How do I find all files containing specific text on Linux

Question

I m trying to find a way to scan my entire Linux system for all files containing a specific string of text  Just to clarify  I m looking for text within the file  not in the file name   When I was looking up how to do this  I came across this solution twice   find   -type f -exec grep -H  text-to-find-here          However  it doesn t work  It seems to display every single file in the system   Is this close to the proper way to do it  If not  how should I  This ability to find text strings in files would be extraordinarily useful for some programming projects I m doing

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You can also use awk   awk     pattern   print    path to find     pattern is the string you want to match in the files

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find  path -type f -exec grep -l  string          Explanation from comments  find is a command that lets you find files and other objects like directories and links in subdirectories of a given path  If you don t specify a mask that filesnames should meet  it enumerates all directory objects   -type f specifies that it should proceed only files  not directories etc  -exec grep specifies that for every found file  it should run grep command  passing its filename as an argument to it  by replacing    with the filename

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You can use grep -ilR   grep -Ril  text-to-find-here       i stands for ignore case  optional in your case     R stands for recursive    l stands for  show the file name  not the result itself     stands for starting at the root of your machine

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Use pwd to search from any directory you are in  recursing downward  grep -rnw  pwd  -e  pattern    Update Depending on the version of grep you are using  you can omit pwd  On newer versions   seems to be the default case for grep if no directory is given thus   grep -rnw -e  pattern    or   grep -rnw  pattern    will do the same thing as above

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Try this  find   -type f -name some file name xml -exec grep -H PUT YOUR STRING HERE

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Try   find   -name    txt    xargs grep -i  text pattern

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I am fascinated by how simple grep makes it with  rl    grep -rl  pattern to find   path where to find  -r to recursively find a file   directory inside directories   -l to list files matching the  pattern       Use  -r  without  l  to see the file names followed by text in which the pattern is found    grep -r  pattern to find   path where to find   It works just perfect

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A Simple find can work handy  alias it in your    bashrc file   alias ffind find   -type f   xargs grep   Start a new terminal and issue   ffind  text-to-find-here

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Find any files whose name is   kube config   and content include eks use1d   locate   kube config    xargs -i sh -c  echo   n   cat      grep eks use1d

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Avoid the hassle and install ack-grep  It eliminates a lot of permission and quotation issues   apt-get install ack-grep   Then go to the directory you want to search and run the command below  cd   ack-grep  find my keyword

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Use   grep -c Your Pattern     This will report how many copies of your pattern are there in each of the files in the current directory

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Try this   find     xargs grep  word  -sl

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You can use ripgrep which will respect by default project s  gitignore file  To suppress Permission denied errors rg -i rustacean 2 gt   dev null  which will redirect the stderr  standard error output  to  dev null

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You can use below command as you don t want file name but you want to search from all the files   Here are i am capturing  TEXT  form All the log files making sure that file name is not printed  grep -e TEXT   log   cut -d    --complement -s -f1   grep with -e option is quite quick compared to other option as it is for PATTERN match

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grep can be used even if we re not looking for a string   Simply running   grep -RIl        will print out the path to all text files  i e  those containing only printable characters

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You can use the following commands to find particular text from a file   cat file   grep  abc    cut -d    -f2

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Kindly customize below command according to demand and find any string recursively from files  grep -i hack   find  etc  -type f

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Here are the several list of commands that can be used to search file   grep  text string to search    directory-path  grep  option   text string to search    directory-path  grep -r  text string to search    directory-path  grep -r -H  text string to search    directory-path  egrep -R  word-1 word-2    directory-path  egrep -w -R  word-1 word-2    directory-path

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Silver Searcher is a terrific tool  but ripgrep may be even better     It works on Linux  Mac and Windows  and was written up on Hacker News a couple of months ago  this has a link to Andrew Gallant s Blog which has a GitHub link    Ripgrep     A new command line search tool

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List of file names containing a given text  First of all  I believe you have used -H instead of -l  Also you can try adding the text inside quotes followed by        find   -type f -exec grep -l  text-to-find-here           Example  Let s say you are searching for files containing specific text  Apache License  inside your directory  It will display results somewhat similar to below  output will be different based on your directory content    bash-4 1  find   -type f -exec grep -l  Apache License           net java jvnet-parent 5 jvnet-parent-5 pom   commons-cli commons-cli 1 3 1 commons-cli-1 3 1 pom   io swagger swagger-project 1 5 10 swagger-project-1 5 10 pom   io netty netty-transport 4 1 7 Final netty-transport-4 1 7 Final pom   commons-codec commons-codec 1 9 commons-codec-1 9 pom   commons-io commons-io 2 4 commons-io-2 4 pom bash-4 1     Remove case sensitiveness  Even if you are not use about the case like  text  vs  TEXT   you can use the -i switch to ignore case  You can read further details here    Hope this helps you

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find with xargs is preferred when there are many potential matches to sift through  It runs more slowly than other options  but it always works  As some have discovered xargs does not handle files with embedded spaces by default  You can overcome this by specifying the -d option    Here is  RobEarl s answer  enhanced so it handles files with spaces   find   -type f   xargs -d   n  grep  text-to-find-here    Here is  venkat s answer  similarly enhanced   find   -name    txt    xargs -d   n  grep -i  text pattern    Here is  Gert van Biljon s answer  similarly enhanced   find   -type f -name       -print0   xargs -d   n  --null grep --with-filename --line-number --no-messages --color --ignore-case  searthtext    Here is  LetalProgrammer s answer  similarly enhanced   alias ffind find   -type f   xargs -d   n  grep   Here is  Tayab Hussain s answer  similarly enhanced   find     xargs -d   n  grep  word  -sl

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There is an ack tool that would do exactly what you are looking for   http   linux die net man 1 ack  ack -i search string folder path     You may ignore -i for case sensitive search

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As Peter in the previous answer mentioned  all previous answers suggest grep and find   But there is a more sophisticated way using Gnome Commander with a perfect GUI and with tons of options since 2001  and finding files is just one of them  It is a free utility as well  proven by time

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How do I find all files containing specific text on Linux               I came across this solution twice       find   -type f -exec grep -H  text-to-find-here            If using find like in your example  better add -s  --no-messages  to grep  and 2 gt  dev null at the end of the command to avoid lots of Permission denied messages issued by grep and find   find   -type f -exec grep -sH  text-to-find-here        2 gt  dev null   find is the standard tool for searching files - combined with grep when looking for specific text - on Unix-like platforms  The find command is often combined with xargs  by the way   Faster and easier tools exist for the same purpose - see below  Better try them  provided they re available on your platform  of course   Faster and easier alternatives  RipGrep - fastest search tool around   rg  text-to-find-here    -l   The Silver Searcher   ag  text-to-find-here    -l   ack   ack  text-to-find-here    -l   Note  You can add 2 gt  dev null to these commands as well  to hide many error messages     Warning  unless you really can t avoid it  don t search from      the root directory  to avoid a long and inefficient search   So in the examples above  you d better replace     by a sub-directory name  e g    home  depending where you actually want to search

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Hope this is of assistance     Expanding the grep a bit to give more information in the output  for example  to get the line number in the file where the text is can be done as follows   find   -type f -name       -print0   xargs --null grep --with-filename --line-number --no-messages --color --ignore-case  searthtext    And if you have an idea what the file type is you can narrow your search down by specifying file type extensions to search for  in this case  pas OR  dfm files   find   -type f    -name    pas  -o -name    dfm     -print0   xargs --null grep --with-filename --line-number --no-messages --color --ignore-case  searchtext    Short explanation of the options      in the find specifies from the current directory  -name         for all files   -name    pas  -o -name    dfm      Only the   pas OR   dfm files  OR specified with -o -type f specifies that you are looking for files -print0 and --null on the other side of the    pipe  are the crucial ones  passing the filename from the find to the grep embedded in the xargs  allowing for the passing of filenames WITH spaces in the filenames  allowing grep to treat the path and filename as one string  and not break it up on each space

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If you are in a git repository you can use  git grep something

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Try this command  Which will give you the files containing the pattern you entered   sudo grep -inr  your-pattern      Here  i - Ignore case distinctions  so that characters that differ only in case match each other   n - Make  sure  that the first character of actual line content lies on a tab stop  so that the alignment of tabs looks normal   r - Read  all  files  under each directory  recursively  following symbolic links only if they are on the command line   Note that if no file operand is given  grep searches the working directory

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The below command will work fine for this approach   find    -name  file pattern name   -exec grep -r  pattern

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If you strictly want to use find then use find   grep  find  path to somewhere  -type f -exec grep -nw  textPattern        Steps   Use find to search files  Execute grep on all of them   This gives you the power of find to find files   Use -name Pattern if you want to grep only certain files   find  path to somewhere  -type f -name    cpp -exec grep -nw  textPattern        You can use different options of find to improve your file search

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grep  GNU or BSD  You can use grep tool to search recursively the current folder  like  grep -r  quot class foo quot     Note  -r - Recursively search subdirectories  You can also use globbing syntax to search within specific files such as  grep  quot class foo quot       c  Note  By using globbing option       it scans all the files recursively with specific extension or pattern  To enable this syntax  run  shopt -s globstar  You may also use        for all files  excluding hidden and without extension  or any other pattern  If you ve the error that your argument is too long  consider narrowing down your search  or use find syntax instead such as  find   -name  quot   php quot  -execdir grep -nH --color auto foo         Alternatively  use ripgrep  ripgrep If you re working on larger projects or big files  you should use ripgrep instead  like  rg  quot class foo quot     Checkout the docs  installation steps or source code on the GitHub project page  It s much quicker than any other tool like GNU BSD grep  ucg  ag  sift  ack  pt or similar  since it is built on top of Rust s regex engine which uses finite automata  SIMD and aggressive literal optimizations to make searching very fast  It supports ignore patterns specified in  gitignore files  so a single file path can be matched against multiple glob patterns simultaneously   You can use common parameters such as   -i - Insensitive searching  -I - Ignore the binary files  -w - Search for the whole words  in the opposite of partial word matching   -n - Show the line of your match  -C --context  e g  -C5  - Increases context  so you see the surrounding code  --color auto - Mark up the matching text  -H - Displays filename where the text is found  -c - Displays count of matching lines  Can be combined with -H

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If your grep doesn t support recursive search  you can combine find with xargs   find   -type f   xargs grep  text-to-find-here    I find this easier to remember than the format for find -exec   This will output the filename and the content of the matched line  e g    home rob file text-to-find-here   Optional flags you may want to add to grep    -i - case insensitive search -l - only output the filename where the match was found -h - only output the line which matched  not the filename

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Try   find   -type f -exec grep -H  text-to-find-here          which will search all file systems  because   is the root folder   For home folder use   find    -type f -exec grep -H  text-to-find-here          For current folder use   find    -type f -exec grep -H  text-to-find-here

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grep -lrnw   root Desktop ipozal  -e  geolocation

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You can use   grep -r  string to be searched    path to dir   The r stands for recursive and so will search in the path specified and also its sub-directories  This will tell you the file name as well as print out the line in the file where the string appears   Or a command similar to the one you are trying  example    for searching in all javascript files    js    find   -name    js  -exec grep -i  string to search for        -print   This will print the lines in the files where the text appears  but it does not print the file name   In addition to this command  we can write this too  grep -rn  String to search   path to directory or file -r  recursive search n  line number will be shown for matches

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I wrote a Python script which does something similar  This is how one should use this script     sniff py path pattern to search  file pattern    The first argument  path  is the directory in which we will search recursively  The second argument  pattern to search  is a regular expression which we want to search in a file  We use the regular expression format defined in the Python re library  In this script  the   also matches newline   The third argument  file pattern  is optional  This is another regular expression which works on a filename  Only those files which matches this regular expression will be considered    For example  if I want to search Python files with the extension py containing Pool  followed by word Adaptor  I do the following     sniff py    Pool    Adaptor     py   Demos snippets cubeMeshSigNeur py 146    Demos snippets testSigNeur py 259    python moose multiscale core mumbl py 206    Demos snippets multiComptSigNeur py 268    And voila  it generates the path of matched files and line number at which the match was found  If more than one match was found  then each line number will be appended to the filename

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You can use this   grep -inr  Text  folder to be searched

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Try this   find   -type f -name     -exec grep -il  String to search          Or  for i in    do grep -Ril  String to search   i done 2 gt   dev null

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I m trying to find a way to scan my entire Linux system for all files containing a specific string of text      Is this close to the proper way to do it  If not  how should I      This ability to find text strings in files would be extraordinarily useful for some programming projects I m doing   While you should never replace  or alias  a system command with a different program  due to risk of mysterious breakage of scripts or other utilities  if you are running a text search manually or from your own scripts or programs you should consider the fastest suitable program when searching a large number of files a number of times  Ten minutes to half an hour time spent installing and familiarizing yourself with a better utility can be recovered after a few uses for the use-case you described  A webpage offering a  quot Feature comparison of ack  ag  git-grep  GNU grep and ripgrep quot  can assist you to decide which program offers the features you need   Andrew Gallant s Blog claims   quot ripgrep is faster than  grep  ag  git grep  ucg  pt  sift  quot   a claim shared by some of the others  this is why a feature comparison is helpful   Of particular interest is his section on regex implementations and pitfalls  The following command searches all files  including hidden and executable    rg -uuu foobar  The Silver Searcher  ag  claims it is 5-10x faster than Ack  This program is suggested in some other answers  The GitHub doesn t appear as recent as ripgrep s and there are noticably more commits and branches with fewer releases  it s hard to draw an absolute claim based on those stats  The short version  ripgrep is faster  but there s a tiny learning curve to not get caught by the differences   So what could be next  you guessed it  the platinum searcher  The claims are  it searches code about 3   5   faster than ack  but its speed is equal to the silver searcher  It s written in GoLang and searches UTF-8  EUC-JP and Shift JIS files  if that s of greater interest  The GitHub is neither particularly recent or active  GoLang itself has a fast and robust regex  but the platinum searcher would be better recommended if it had a better user interest    For a combination of speed and power indexed query languages such as ElasticSearch or Solr can be a long term investment that pays off  but not if you want a quick and simple replacement for grep  OTOH both have an API which can be called from any program you write  adding powerful searches to your program  While it s possible to spawn an external program  execute a search  intercept its output and process it  calling an API is the way to go for power and performance   This question was protected Aug 6  15 at 19 34 with this caution     We re looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context  Don t just give a one-line answer  explain why your answer is right  ideally with citations   While some answers suggest alternative ways to accomplish a search they don t explain why other than it s  quot free quot    quot faster quot    quot more sophisticated quot    quot tons of features quot   etc  Don t try to sell it  just tell us  quot why your answer is right quot   I ve attempted to teach how to choose what s best for the user  and why  This is why I offer yet another answer  when there are already so many  Otherwise I d agree that there are already quite a few answers  I hope I ve brought a lot new to the table

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grep -insr  pattern       i  Ignore case distinctions in both the PATTERN and the input files  n  Prefix each line of output with the 1-based line number within its input file  s  Suppress error messages about nonexistent or unreadable files  r  Read all files under each directory  recursively

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If you have a set of files that you will always be checking you can alias their paths  for example   alias fd  find   -type f -regex        inc  info  module  php  test  install  uninstall       Then you can simply filter the list like this   grep -U -l    015    fd    Which filters out the list fd to files that contain the CR pattern   I find that aliasing the files that I am interested in helps me create easier scripts then always trying to remember how to get all those files   The recursive stuff works as well but sooner or later you are going to have to contend with weeding out specific file types   Which is is why I just find all the file types I m interested in to begin with

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GUI Search Alternative - For Desktop Use   - As the question is not precisely asking for commands  Searchmonkey  Advanced file search tool without having to index your system using regular expressions  Graphical equivalent to find grep  Available for Linux  Gnome KDE Java  and Windows  Java  - open source GPL v3  Features    Advanced Regular Expressions Results shown in-context Search containing text Panel to display line containing text New 2018 updates etc    Download - Links    Homepage  http   searchmonkey embeddediq com  Download  http   searchmonkey embeddediq com index php download-latest Repo  https   sourceforge net projects searchmonkey files       Screen-shot

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I tried the grep command below  It helps searching contents within my repository at  etc yum repos d   grep   -Ril -e  texttoSearch   etc yum repos d

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grep is your good friend to achieve this   grep -r  lt text fo find gt   lt directory gt    If you don t care about the case of the text to find  then use   grep -ir  lt text to find gt   lt directory gt

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Your command is correct  You just need to add -l to grep   find   -type f -exec grep -l  text-to-find-here

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All previous answers suggest grep and find  But there is another way  Use Midnight Commander  It is a free utility  30 years old  proven by time  which is visual without being GUI  It has tons of functions  and finding files is just one of them

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To search for the string and output just that line with the search string    for i in   find  path of target directory -type f   do grep -i  the string to look for    i   done   e g    for i in   find  usr share applications -type f     do grep -i  web browser    i   done   To display filename containing the search string   for i in   find  path of target directory -type f   do if grep -i  the string to look for    i   gt   dev null  then echo   i   fi  done    e g    for i in   find  usr share applications -type f     do if grep -i  web browser    i   gt   dev null  then echo   i     fi  done

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There s a new utility called The Silversearcher  sudo apt install silversearcher-ag   It works closely with Git and other VCS  So you won t get anything in a  git or another directory   You can simply use  ag  Search query    And it will do the task for you

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See also The Platinium Searcher  which is similar to The Silver Searcher and it s written in Go   Example   pt -e  text to search

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You can use ack  It is like grep for source code  You can scan your entire file system with it   Just do   ack  text-to-find-here    In your root directory   You can also use regular expressions  specify the filetype  etc     UPDATE  I just discovered The Silver Searcher  which is like ack but 3-5x faster than it and even ignores patterns from a  gitignore file

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Do the following  grep -rnw   path to somewhere   -e  pattern    -r or -R is recursive  -n is line number  and -w stands for match the whole word  -l  lower-case L  can be added to just give the file name of matching files  -e is the pattern used during the search  Along with these  --exclude  --include  --exclude-dir flags could be used for efficient searching   This will only search through those files which have  c or  h extensions   grep --include     c h  -rnw   path to somewhere   -e  quot pattern quot    This will exclude searching all the files ending with  o extension   grep --exclude    o -rnw   path to somewhere   -e  quot pattern quot    For directories it s possible to exclude one or more directories using the --exclude-dir parameter  For example  this will exclude the dirs dir1   dir2  and all of them matching   dst    grep --exclude-dir  dir1 dir2   dst  -rnw   path to somewhere   -e  quot pattern quot   This works very well for me  to achieve almost the same purpose like yours  For more options check man grep

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Use   grep -Erni    text you wanna search    The command will search recursively in all files and directories of the current directory and print the result   Note  if your grep output isn t colored  you can change it by using the grep  grep --color always  alias in your shell source file

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