SEARCH FOR TEXT IN FILES IN LINUX GREP NR HOW TO
You might also be interested in: How To Repeat A Command Every X Seconds On Linux If you don't want to search in the current folder, but in a specific folder, you can specify the path in which grep should look into, by adding it at the end of the command, like this: If you only want to list the filenames containing the exact whole word text (as opposed to the default partial word matching), and not things like texting, 123text, and so on, you'd need to append the -w (whole words) command line option, like this: If you require following all symbolic links, use -R instead of -r. r stands for recursive, reading all the files in the directory and its subdirectories. This includes strings like texting for example, because it contains our search pattern, text.
This lists all the files in the current folder and subfolders containing text. To do this, you need to open the terminal, navigate to the folder where you want to perform the search, and run: Say you want to search for the word text (case-sensitive!) in all the files in the current directory and its subdirectories. Grep is a command-line utility which prints lines that match a given pattern, and should be installed by default. For this we'll use grep, a standard Unix program. $ grep "tech" techdirectarchhiveblog.This article explains how to find all files containing specific text on Linux. This is because in the second line also has the word tech as part of the pattern we are looking for in the word “tech”. The first line of the file has the word "tech" and the second line contain the prefix "tech" in the word "technology" you will find out that this will print out the two lines at once and not just the first line. Printing Part of whole Word with the grep command# – What if you want to match the search pattern that forms whole word? For instance consider the example in the txt file “techdirectarchhiveblog.txt” that contains two lines. Refer to the output screen below: grep -v flag command In this case the second and the fifth line contain the string printed it’s not printed to the output screen.
This option lists all lines that do not contain the particular string or pattern you search for. What if we want to do the opposite that’s, print all lines that do not match the search pattern.
If you’re running CentOS, see below the command for installing locate on your system. I am running an Ubuntu distro from the Debian family.
SEARCH FOR TEXT IN FILES IN LINUX GREP NR INSTALL
Install locate command on Ubuntu and Debian $ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install locate Installing locateįrom my screenshot above, the system is reporting that my locate package was automatically installed and it’s no longer required. If locate command is not installed, you can easily install it using the package manager of your distro. Otherwise, it will return something like locate command not found. If it is installed, the system will display locate: no pattern to search for specified.
To check whether the locate utility is installed, open up your terminal, type locate and press Enter. Installing locate commandĭepending on the Linux distribution and how the system is configured, the locate package may or may not be pre-installed on your Linux system. When using the locate search command for the first time that is, if you have just done setting up your Linux OS such as Ubuntu, you need to install the command before it can be found to return results for any search you want to do. The locate command is the quickest and simplest way to search for files and directories by their names. The first command on our list is the locate command.