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 .
Finding a substring in files across subdirectories with a single built-in command?
However, in Linux (say, Ubuntu) I have found no other way than some piped command involving find , xargs , and grep (an example is at this page: How can I recursively grep through sub-directories?). However, my question is different: is there any single, built-in command that works through this magic, without having to write my shell script?
5 Answers 5
GNU grep allows searching recursively through subdirectories:
grep -r --include='*.h' 'the string' . I tried this exact command line in Ubuntu but get «grep: invalid option — ‘M'» although I can’t see any ‘M’ anywhere. puzzling
In a suggested edit TomasG recommends changing the last * to ‘*’ : «Quoting the last wildcard is needed to avoid errors when some filename starts with -«
@Guido: Your problem may have been due to a file in the current directory called -Msomething , or to a GREP_OPTIONS setting.
grep -r searchpattern /path/to/start/in
Where /path/to/start/in/ can be just » . » for the current directory.
No. find -name \*.h -print0 | xargs -0 grep -l ‘the regex’ is as magic as it gets.
To find string from given directory use below command
find /apps_bev/apps/xfer/export/02210 -name '*' -exec grep -l '38221000001032' <> \; grep can take more than one file as arguments, so you should use + instead of \; to avoid running one grep invocation per file which is quite inefficient.
Note that -name ‘*’ restricts to files whose name is valid text in the current locale (in some find implementations at least), but the other directory components may still contain sequences of bytes that don’t form valid characters. If your intention with that -name ‘*’ was to make sure the output is valid text (by omiting the files with improper names), you’d rather use find . ! -name ‘*’ -prune -o -exec grep . <> + , which would also stop find from descending into directories with improper names.
is there any single, built-in command that works through this magic . ?
To be pedantic, no, you cannot assume such a command exists.
There are many different implementations of Unix, and each has its different quirks. POSIX, the common denominator (and closest thing to a standard across Unices) does not specify such an option for grep .
As mentionned in other answers, GNU’s implementation of grep has a non-standard option that does what you want. While this particular implementation might be common on Linux systems, you cannot assume its availability on any Unix, even some Linux systems.
Finally, I should mention that it is the Unix philosophy to favor the combination of several primitive programs, over the use of one big monolithic executable attempting to do everything at once.
In your case, crawling the file system and matching regexp in a stream are two separate tasks. It is only normal to treat each in a separate program.
How to find lines containing a string in linux [closed]
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I have a file in Linux, I would like to display lines which contain a specific string in that file, how to do this?
5 Answers 5
The usual way to do this is with grep , which uses a regex pattern to match lines:
Each line which matches the pattern will be output. If you want to search for fixed strings only, use grep -F ‘pattern’ file . fgrep is shorthand for grep -F .
addition grep -rn ‘string’ /path/ if you want to search a string in a folder in which file including and line number
Besides grep , you can also use other utilities such as awk or sed
Here is a few examples. Let say you want to search for a string is in the file named GPL .
Your sample file
$ cat -n GPL 1 The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for 2 The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed 3 the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to 4 GNU General Public License for most of our software; $ grep is GPL The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to $ awk /is/ GPL The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to $ sed -n '/is/p' GPL The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to