Find files containing a pattern

You can find files with grep or find with grep.

Using grep

grep -riHn [pattern] .

This will recursively find all files under the current directory (and it’s subdirectories) that contain the given pattern.

The flags are as follows:

• r recursive search.
• i ignore character case.
• H includes the filenames in the output.
• n shows line numbers.

Using find and grep

find [path] -name [filename] -exec grep -iHn [pattern] {} \;

This will recursively search the directory [path] for files named [filename] that contain the [pattern]. For each match found, it will output the line containing the pattern.

The flags are as above.

For example, find . -name "*.html" -exec grep -iHn mindSpill {} \; will recursively search the current directory for any HTML files containing the word “mindspill”.

You can leave off the -name argument to search all files in the given directory.

Another useful grep flag is l to suppress normal output and instead print the name of each input file from which output would normally have been printed.

xargs

The combination of the find command, pipes and xargs is a very useful one - it can be used to perform a command on/with each of the found files. See xargs for details of how to use xargs.

Last modified: 19/02/2007 Tags: find, grep, xargs