Find all files with name containing string [closed]
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I have been searching for a command that will return files from the current directory which contain a string in the filename. I have seen locate and find commands that can find files beginning with something first_word* or ending with something *.jpg . How can I return a list of files which contain a string in the filename? For example, if 2012-06-04-touch-multiple-files-in-linux.markdown was a file in the current directory. How could I return this file and others containing the string touch ? Using a command such as find ‘/touch/’
8 Answers 8
find . -maxdepth 1 -name «*string*» -print
It will find all files in the current directory (delete maxdepth 1 if you want it recursive) containing «string» and will print it on the screen.
If you want to avoid file containing ‘:’, you can type:
find . -maxdepth 1 -name «*string*» ! -name «*:*» -print
If you want to use grep (but I think it’s not necessary as far as you don’t want to check file content) you can use:
But, I repeat, find is a better and cleaner solution for your task.
@Dru, if you want it ‘shorter’ you can avoid -print as this is the default behaviour and . as this is the default folder where it checks.
Awesome. I see myself using this a lot. I will take your -print and . removal suggestions, make it a command, and try to pass *string* in as a command line argument.
find . -name «*string*» Works great too. Removing . throws an error on my end. Thanks again @Zagorax.
Just an observation, the above command complained about the position of -maxdepth argument better to move it before -name as @Sunil Dias mentioned
I have find *.jpg -name «*from*» -print which works for a given directory. How can I make search recursively? I’ve tried -maxdepth .
-R means recurse. If you would rather not go into the subdirectories, then skip it.
-i means «ignore case». You might find this worth a try as well.
Great. I noticed that some file contents follow a : . Is there anyway to withhold that? Using an option perhaps?
That seems to only produce the contents of the files. You essentially answered my question though, I can try to do some digging for withholding the contents.
Ah. you only need the file names? Run : grep -R «touch» . | cut -d «:» -f 1 (sorry must have misread you).
Thanks @carlspring this is interesting. grep either returns files with contents and filenames containing touch or contents containing touch , I’m not sure which is the case, yet. Of the list of files returned, half contain touch in the title and the other half conatains touch in the body, not the title. Just realized this.
The -maxdepth option should be before the -name option, like below.,
find . -maxdepth 1 -name "string" -print find $HOME -name "hello.c" -print This will search the whole $HOME (i.e. /home/username/ ) system for any files named “hello.c” and display their pathnames:
/Users/user/Downloads/hello.c /Users/user/hello.c However, it will not match HELLO.C or HellO.C . To match is case insensitive pass the -iname option as follows:
find $HOME -iname "hello.c" -print /Users/user/Downloads/hello.c /Users/user/Downloads/Y/Hello.C /Users/user/Downloads/Z/HELLO.c /Users/user/hello.c Pass the -type f option to only search for files:
find /dir/to/search -type f -iname "fooBar.conf.sample" -print find $HOME -type f -iname "fooBar.conf.sample" -print The -iname works either on GNU or BSD (including OS X) version find command. If your version of find command does not supports -iname , try the following syntax using grep command:
find $HOME | grep -i "hello.c" find $HOME -name "*" -print | grep -i "hello.c" find $HOME -name '[hH][eE][lL][lL][oO].[cC]' -print /Users/user/Downloads/Z/HELLO.C /Users/user/Downloads/Z/HEllO.c /Users/user/Downloads/hello.c /Users/user/hello.c If the string is at the beginning of the name, you can do this
$ compgen -f .bash .bashrc .bash_profile .bash_prompt compgen is not an appropriate hammer for this nail. This little-used tool is designed to list available commands, and as such, it lists files in the current directory (which could be scripts) and it can neither recurse nor look past the beginning of a file name nor search file contents, making it mostly useless.
An alternative to the many solutions already provided is making use of the glob ** . When you use bash with the option globstar ( shopt -s globstar ) or you make use of zsh , you can just use the glob ** for this.
does a recursive directory search for files named bar (potentially including the file bar in the current directory). Remark that this cannot be combined with other forms of globbing within the same path segment; in that case, the * operators revert to their usual effect.
Note that there is a subtle difference between zsh and bash here. While bash will traverse soft-links to directories, zsh will not. For this you have to use the glob ***/ in zsh .
How to find all files containing specific text in Linux
This tutorial will teach you how to recursively search for files containing a specific string on Linux using the command line. This tutorial uses the ‘grep’ command to search for strings in files. Alternatively, you may use the find command to look for files with specific content.
A basic syntax for searching text with grep command:
The grep command offers other useful options for finding specific text in file systems.
- -r, —recursive : Search files recursively
- -R, —dereference-recursive : Search files recursively and follow symlinks
- —include=FILE_PATTERN : search only files that match FILE_PATTERN
- —exclude=FILE_PATTERN : skip files and directories matching FILE_PATTERN
- —exclude-from=FILE : skip files matching any file pattern from FILE
- —exclude-dir=PATTERN : directories that match PATTERN will be skipped.
- -L, —files-without-match : Print file names containing no match
- -l, —files-with-matches : Print string containing file names only
- -i, —ignore-case : ignore case of search string
- -e, —regexp=PATTERN : Use a pattern to search or specify multiple search strings
- -w, —word-regexp : force to match whole words
There are several ways to use the grep command to search text. Let’s discuss a few examples of searching a text/string in the file system.
The below example command will search the string “Error” in all files in /var/log directory and its sub-directories.
The -e switch can also be utilized to find multiple strings. This is comparable to the egrep program. The example below will look for “Error” and “Warning” in all the files in the /var/log directory and its subdirectories.
grep -rlw -e "Error" -e "Warning" /var/log 
You can search strings in files that match the file name criteria. The following command searches for “Error” in files with the .log extension in the /var/log directory and its sub-directories.
grep -rlw --include="*.log" -e "Error" /var/log You can use the —exclude option in find to exclude some files that match certain file name criteria. For example, you can exclude files with the .txt extension.
grep -rlw --exclude="*.txt" -e "tecadmin" /var/log You can also skip searching certain directories. For instance, don’t search for string files in any folder with apache2 in its name.
grep -rlw --exclude-dir="*apache2*" -e "tecadmin" /var/log Conclusion
You have learned how to search for specific text in files on the Linux file system in this tutorial.
On Linux, how can I find all files that contain a string and delete them?
Please clarify: do you want to delete files whose name contains foo (e.g. myfoo.jpg ), or files that contain the byte sequence foo (which may include binary files which just so happen to contain that sequence of bytes)?
3 Answers 3
grep -lrIZ foo . | xargs -0 rm -f -- - -l prints file names of files matching the search pattern.
- -r performs a recursive search for the pattern foo in the given directory . . If this doesn’t work, try -R .
- -I (capital i ) causes binary files like PDFs to be skipped.
- -Z ensures that file names are zero- (i.e., nul-)terminated so that a name containing white space does not get interpreted in the wrong way (i.e., as multiple names instead of one).
- xargs -0 feeds the file names from grep to rm -f , separating words by zero (nul) bytes (remember the -Z option from grep ).
- — is often forgotten but it is very important to mark the end of options and allow for removal of files whose names begin with — .
If you would like to see which files are about to be deleted, simply remove the | xargs -0 rm -f — part, and leave off the Z option to grep .
Another user suggested something like the following, which you should not run because it is unsafe:
files=`grep foo * | cut -d: -f1` rm -f $files # unsafe, do not run it! If I have files ImportantStuff that I do not want to delete and obsolete ImportantStuff containing foo , then I lose ImportantStuff (and not obsolete ImportantStuff !) when I run this command, because $files gets broken apart at spaces when it is interpreted. It is dangerous to put a list of filenames into a scalar shell variable in this way.