Grep – How to Return File Name and Line Number with Find -exec

findgrep

When using find, how do I return the file name and the line number when searching for a string? I manage to return the file name in one command and the line numbers with another one, but I can't seem to combine them.

File names: find . -type f -exec grep -l 'string to search' {} \;

Line numbers: find . -type f -exec grep -n 'string to search' {} \;

Best Answer

The command line switch -H forces grep to print the file name, even with just one file.

% grep -n 7 test.in
7:7
% grep -Hn 7 test.in
test.in:7:7

   -H, --with-filename
          Print the filename for each match.

Note that as Kojiro says in a comment, this is not part of the POSIX standard; it is in both GNU and BSD grep, but it's possible some systems don't have it (e.g. Solaris).

Related Solutions

Grep a directory and return list with line numbers

Many grep variants implement a recursive option. E.g., GNU grep

-R, -r, --recursive
          Read all files under each directory, recursively; this is equivalent to the -d recurse option.

You can then remove find:

grep -n -r $pattern $path | awk '{ print $1 }'

but this keeps more than the line number. awk is printing the first column. This example

src/main/package/A.java:3:import java.util.Map;
src/main/package/A.java:5:import javax.security.auth.Subject;
src/main/package/A.java:6:import javax.security.auth.callback.CallbackHandler;

will be printed as

src/main/package/A.java:3:import
src/main/package/A.java:5:import
src/main/package/A.java:6:import

notice the :import in each line. You might want to use sed to filter the output.

Since a : could be present in the file name you can use the -Z option of grep to output a nul character (\0) after the file name.

grep -rZn $pattern $path | sed -e "s/[[:cntrl:]]\([0-9][0-9]*\).*/:\1/"

with the same example as before will produce

src/main/package/A.java:3
src/main/package/A.java:5
src/main/package/A.java:6

Bash – Recursive search for a pattern, then for each match print out the specific SEQUENCE: line number, file name, and no file contents

Using grep

Why can't you just use the -r switch to grep to recurse the filesystem instead of making use of find? There are 2 additional switches I'd use too, instead of the -n switch.

$ grep -rHn PATTERN <DIR> | cut -d":" -f1-2

Example #1

$ grep -rHn PATH ~/.bashrc | cut -d":" -f1-2
/home/saml/.bashrc:25

Details

-r - recursively search through files + directories
-H - prints the name of the file if it matches (less restrictive than -l) i.e. it works with grep's other switches
-n - display the line number of the match

Example #2

$ grep -rHn PATH ~/.bash* | cut -d":" -f1-2
/home/saml/.bash_profile:10
/home/saml/.bash_profile:12
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:99
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:101
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:118
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:166
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:218
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:250
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:314
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:2317
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:2323
/home/saml/.bashrc:25

Using find

$ find . -exec sh -c 'grep -Hn PATTERN "$@" | cut -d":" -f1-2' {}  +

Example

$ find ~/.bash* -exec sh -c 'grep -Hn PATH "$@" | cut -d":" -f1-2' {}  +
/home/saml/.bash_profile:10
/home/saml/.bash_profile:12
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:99
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:101
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:118
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:166
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:218
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:250
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:314
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:2317
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:2323
/home/saml/.bashrc:25

If you truly want to use find you can do something like this to exec grep upon finding the files using find.