Linux find files 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 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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Find Files Containing Specific Text in Linux

Linux, regardless of the distro you use, comes with a number of GUI tools which allow searching for files. Many modern file managers support file searching right in the file list. However, most of them do not allow you to search inside a file’s contents. Here are two methods you can use to search for file contents in Linux.

Probably, there are more methods available. There’s Catfish, a popular search tool with a search index, which can find your files really quickly. It comes with an option to search for file contents, but it does not work reliably for me.

I would like to share the methods I use myself.
The first method involves the grep utility, which exists in any distro, even in embedded systems built on busybox.

To find files containing specific text in Linux, do the following.

1. Open your favorite terminal app. XFCE4 terminal is my personal preference.
2. Navigate (if required) to the folder in which you are going to search files with some specific text.
3. Type the following command:

Here are the switches:
-i — ignore text case
-R — recursively search files in subdirectories.
-l — show file names instead of file contents portions. ./ — the last parameter is the path to the folder containing files you need to search for your text. In our case, it is the current folder with the file mask. You can change it to the full path of the folder. For example, here is my command

grep -iRl "linux" /home/user/Documents/winaero

Note: Other useful switches you might want to use with grep:
-n — show the line number.
-w — match the whole word.

Another method I use is Midnight Commander (mc), the console file manager app. Unlike grep, mc is not included by default in all Linux distros I’ve tried. You may need to install it yourself.

Find files containing specific text with mc

To find files containing some specific text using Midnight Commander, start the app and press the following sequence on the keyboard:
Alt + Shift + ?
This will open the search dialog.

Fill in the «Content:» section and press the Enter key. It will find all files with the required text.

You can place these files in the left or right panel using the Panelize option and copy/move/delete/view/do whatever you want them.

Midnight Commander is a very time-saving tool when it comes to search.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube. View all posts by Sergey Tkachenko

Author Sergey Tkachenko Last updated on: Last updated on: October 8, 2019 Categories Linux Tags Linux Find Files, Linux Find Files Containing Text, Linux Grep

6 thoughts on “Find Files Containing Specific Text in Linux”

The code that you provided helped me. There are also another commands which I cannot remember to find text in files but this one is made it quickly. I have bookmarked this post for further usage. Thank you.

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