Linux find file by contents

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 .

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How to Find Files Containing Specific Text String in Linux

Almost all file managers for Linux like Nemo and Thunar by default provide an option to search for files. But if you want to search for a string inside a file’s content using file manager, the majority of them do not let you do so.

In this article, I’ll discuss different ways that you can use on any Linux distribution to find all files containing specific text strings or words by recursively digging through all sub-directories.

On this page

Search Specific Text in Linux Using Catfish GUI Tool

I’ll start with the easiest way that can work for all including beginners to advance Linux users. Catfish is a simple and lightweight GUI-based file search tool for Linux desktops. Along with searching for files on your system, you can also use it to find all files that contain a particular word.

Install Catfish Search Tool on Linux

The Catfish package is already available on the primary Debian and Ubuntu repositories. Hence, If you’re using Debian or Ubuntu-based distributions, you can simply install it by running the command:

$ sudo apt install catfish [On Debian/Ubuntu & Mint]

On other Linux distributions, you can install it from the default repositories using your package manager.

$ sudo yum install catfish [On CentOS/RHEL 7] $ sudo dnf install catfish [On CentOS/RHEL 8 & Fedora] $ sudo pacman -S catfish [On Arch Linux] $ sudo pkg_add -v catfish [On FreeBSD]

If the package is not available, you can download the latest release file, extract the downloaded tar.bz2 file, and run the following command:

$ sudo python3 setup.py install

Search File Contents Using Catfish

Once installed, you only need to do is enable “Search file contents”, select directories from the top-left dropdown option, and type the text you want to search for. It will list down all files containing text along with file size and location.

You can also use file type and modified date filter from the left panel to reduce the search scope. You can even add a directory path where you don’t want to search.

Search Specific Text in Linux Using Grep Command

Beside the GUI way, grep is one of the popular command line tools that can be used to search inside file content. Since almost all unix-like operating systems ship grep utility by default, you don’t need to install it.

Search for Particular Text in Files

Now to search and find all files for a given text string in a Linux terminal, you can run the following command. Here, the ‘-r’ or ‘-R’ flag recursively searches through the all subdirectories inside the specified directory.

$ grep -r “linuxshelltips” /home/sarvottam/

Find File Names That Contains a Given String

If you want to print only file names and hide the text from the output, you can use the ‘-l’ flag.

$ grep -rl “linuxshelltips” /home/sarvottam/

Print File Names and Line Numbers That Contains a Given String

Furthermore, you can also tweak the output using the following options available for grep:

$ sudo grep -rnwi “linuxshelltips” /home/sarvottam/

It is also worth mentioning that if you search through directories that require root permissions, you need to use the sudo command.

Search for Specific Text in Specific File Types

To further reduce the search scope, you can also specifically mention the type of file and directories to only look for while searching. “—include” , “—exclude” , and “—exclude-dir” are the options available to add file type and directory filter.

$ grep --include=\*.txt --exclude=\*. --exclude-dir=\bin -rnwi "linuxshelltips" /home/sarvottam/

Search Specific Text In Linux Using MC (Midnight Commander)

If you live in a terminal and still want to search text using GUI way, you can also try Terminal User Interface (TUI) based file manager tool, mc (midnight commander) – is a visual file manager that is used to search for files.

Install Midnight Commander on Linux

The Midnight Commander is available to install from the default repositories in the most of the Linux distributions.

$ sudo apt install mc [On Debian/Ubuntu & Mint] $ sudo yum install mc [On CentOS/RHEL 7] $ sudo dnf install mc [On CentOS/RHEL 8 & Fedora] $ sudo pacman -S mc [On Arch Linux] $ sudo pkg_add -v mc [On FreeBSD]

Search File Contents Using Midnigh Commander

Inside the terminal, mc provides a visual representation of the filesystem in which you can navigate either through keyboard or mouse. To search file content, you can open a search dialog using ALT+SHIFT+? and enter the text in the “Content:” section.

As you can see in the above picture, you can also use filters like ignore case, whole words, and regular expression by just checking and unchecking it.

Conclusion

All the above-mentioned applications are beginner’s friendly, free-to-use and open source to add your own enhancements. Alternatively, you can also try other free tools like Ack, The Silver Searcher, Ripgrep, and find command.

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How to find a text file which contains a specific word inside (not in its name)

I want to find a text file in my hard disk which contains a specific word. Prior to Ubuntu 12.4 I used to start in the dash an application, I think it was called «Search for file. «, whose icon was a magnifying glass.I can’t find that simple application any more.

7 Answers 7

You can use the grep command from terminal:

This command will find all occurrences of «word» in all the files under the current directory (or subdrectories).

if grep is called from a shell script, then the search keyword may not print highlighted, but the —color=auto flag can solve that.

sudo apt-get install gnome-search-tool 

Open Search for files select Select More Options and

As suggested here, use mate-search-tool instead which seems to offer identical functionality. Install via sudo apt install mate-utils .

Here’s an overview of different methods that one can use for searching files for specific strings of text, with a few options added specifically to work only with text files, and ignore binary/application files.

One should note,however,that searching for word can get a little complex, because most line-matching tools will try to find a word anywhere on the line. If we’re talking about a word as string that could appear in the beginning or end of line, or alone on the line, or surrounded by spaces and/or punctuation — that’s when we’ll need regular expressions, and especially those that come from Perl. Here, for example, we can use -P in grep to make use of Perl regular expressions to surround it.

$ printf "A-well-a don't you know about the bird?\nWell, everybody knows that the bird is a word" | grep -noP '\bbird\b' 1:bird 2:bird 

Simple grep

• -r for recursive search down from current directory
• -I to ignore binary files
• -H to output filename where match is found

Suitable for searching only.

find + grep

$ find -type f -exec grep -IH 'word' <> \; 

• find does the recursive search part
• -I option is to ignore binary files
• -H to output filename where line is found
• good approach for combining with other commands within subshell, like:

$ find -type f -exec sh -c 'grep -IHq "word" "$1" && echo "Found in $1"' sh <> \; 

Perl

#!/usr/bin/env perl use File::Find; use strict; use warnings; sub find_word< return unless -f; if (open(my $fh, $File::Find::name))< while(my $line = ) < if ($line =~ /\bword\b/)< printf "%s\n", $File::Find::name; close($fh); return; >> > > # this assumes we're going down from current working directory find( < wanted =>\&find_word, no_chdir => 1 >,".") 

poor-mans recursive grep in recursive bash script

This is the «bash way». Not ideal, probably no good reason to use this when you have grep or perl installed.

#!/usr/bin/env bash shopt -s globstar #set -x grep_line() < # note that this is simple pattern matching # If we wanted to search for whole words, we could use # word|word\ |\ word|\ word\ ) # although when we consider punctuation characters as well - it gets more # complex case "$1" in *word*) printf "%s\n" "$2";; esac >readlines() < # line count variable can be used to output on which line match occured #line_count=1 while IFS= read -r line; do grep_line "$line" "$filename" #line_count=$(($line_count+1)) done < "$1" >is_text_file() < # alternatively, mimetype command could be used # with *\ text\/* as pattern in case statement case "$(file -b --mime-type "$1")" in text\/*) return 0;; *) return 1;; esac >main() < for filename in ./**/* do if [ -f "$filename" ] && is_text_file "$filename" then readlines "$filename" fi done >main "$@" 

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