How to grep for a filename instead of the contents of a file

Question

grep is used to search within a file to see if any line matches a given regular expression  However  I have this situation - I want to write a regular expression that will match the filename itself  and not the contents of the file   I will run this from the system s root directory  to find all those files that match the regular expression    For example  if I want to find all VB form files that start with an  f  and end with  frm  I ll use the regular expression -       f   alnum      frm    Can grep do this  If not  is there a utility that would let me do this  Thanks

User · Answer

The easiest way is   find     grep test   here find will list all the files in the     ie current directory  recursively  And then it is just a simple grep  all the files which name has  test  will appeared   you can play with grep as per your requirement  Note   As the grep is generic string classification  It can result in giving you not only file names  but if a path has a directory    xyz test 123 other txt   would also comes to the result set  cheers

User · Answer

As Pablo said  you need to use find instead of grep  but there s no need to pipe find to grep  find has that functionality built in   find   -regex  f   alnum     frm    find is a very powerful program for searching for files by name and supports searching by file type  depth limiting  combining different search terms with boolean operations  and executing arbitrary commands on found files  See the find man page for more information

User · Answer

find -iname  file name   Syntax  - find -type type descriptor file name here   type descriptor types -  f  regular file  d  directory  l  symbolic link  c  character devices  b  block devices

User · Answer

You need to use find instead of grep in this case   You can also use find in combination with grep or egrep     find   grep  f   alnum     frm

User · Answer

Also for multiple files   tree  path to directory    grep -i  file1    file2    file3

User · Answer

Example  find  lt path gt  -name  FileName    From manual   find -name pattern  Base  of  file  name   the  path  with  the  leading directories removed  matches shell pattern pattern  Because the leading directories are removed  the file names considered for a match with -name will never include a slash  so  -name a b  will never match anything  you probably need to use -path instead    The metacharacters            and       match a     at the start of the base name  this is a change in find- utils-4 2 2   see  section  STANDARDS CONFORMANCE below    To ignore a directory and the files under it  use -prune  see an example in the description of -path   Braces are not  recognised  as  being  special  despite  the fact that some shells including Bash imbue braces with a special meaning in shell patterns  The filename matching is performed with the use of the fnmatch 3  library function     Don t  forget  to enclose the pattern in quotes in order to protect it from expansion by the shell

User · Answer

You can also do   tree   grep filename   This pipes the output of the tree command to grep for a search  This will only tell you whether the file exists though

User · Answer

You can find the relative path of a file using tree  just pipe the output to grep to filter down tree -f   grep filename  Here is a function you can put into your  bash profile   bashrc   zshrc or other    findfile    tree -f   grep  1       1   filename  -f is full path

User · Answer

find     grep KeywordToSearch  Here   means current directory which is value for path parameter for find command  It is piped to grep to search keyword which should return all matching result  Note  This is case sensitive  So for example fileName and FileName are not same

User · Answer

No  grep works just fine for this    grep -rl  filename   starting point    grep -rL  not in filename

[grep] How to "grep" for a filename instead of the contents of a file?

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