How to find all files containing specific text (string) on Linux?

Asked 2023-09-20 19:54:52 View 42,802

How do I find all files containing a specific string of text within their file contents?

The following doesn't work. It seems to display every single file in the system.

find / -type f -exec grep -H 'text-to-find-here' {} \;
  • remember that grep will interpret any . as a single-character wildcard, among others. My advice is to alway use either fgrep or egrep. - anyone
  • anyway, you were almost there! Just replace -H with -l (and maybe grep with fgrep). To exclude files with certain patterns of names you would use find in a more advanced way. It's worthwile to learn to use find, though. Just man find. - anyone
  • find … -exec <cmd> + is easier to type and faster than find … -exec <cmd> \;. It works only if <cmd> accepts any number of file name arguments. The saving in execution time is especially big if <cmd> is slow to start like Python or Ruby scripts. - anyone
  • Does this answer your question? How can I use grep to find a word inside a folder? - anyone

Answers

Do the following:

grep -Rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e 'pattern'
  • -r or -R is recursive ; use -R to search entirely
  • -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 "pattern"
    
  • This will exclude searching all the files ending with .o extension:

    grep --exclude=\*.o -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
    
  • 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/search/' -e "pattern"
    

This works very well for me, to achieve almost the same purpose like yours.

For more options, see man grep.

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • use --exclude. like "grep -rnw --exclude=*.o 'directory' -e "pattern" - anyone
  • it's worth noting: it seems the r option is lazy (traverses depth-first, than stops after the first directory), while R is greedy (will traverse the entire tree correctly). - anyone
  • Note(especially for newbies): The quotation marks in the above command are important. - anyone
  • For me it was useful to add the -I option to skip all binary files. - anyone

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.

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • Based on my experience, the -i makes it slow down a lot, so don't use it if not necessary. Test it in a certain dir and then generalise. It should be completed within few minutes. I think a regular expression would make it slower. But my comments are based on suppositions, I suggest you to test it with time in front of the line. - anyone
  • You can replace / with path to directory grep -Ril "text-to-find-here" ~/sites/ or use . for current directory grep -Ril "text-to-find-here" . - anyone
  • Very slow though. Not recommended for large file systems. - anyone
  • on my distro grep used lowercase "R" so it was => grep -ril "name" /, but uppercase R didn't work. - anyone

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.

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • Very useful, simple and fast. Warning: "On Debian-derived distros, ack is packaged as "ack-grep" because "ack" already existed" (from beyondgrep.com/install). You may end up running a Kanji code converter on those Linuxes... - anyone
  • ack or ack-grep has nice highlights, but find+grep when proper used is much better in performance - anyone
  • Note that ripgrep is faster than anything else mentioned here, including The Silver Searcher and plain 'ol grep. See this blog post for proof. - anyone
  • on Ubuntu and LinuxMint, use $ ag 'what I want' ./ - anyone

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

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • Thank you for the 'find' version! It is so important to be able to filter by '.js' or '.txt', etc. Nobody wants to spend hours waiting for grep to finish searching all the multi-gigabyte videos from the last family vacation, even if the command is easier to type. - anyone

Recursive and case insensitive grep with line numbers:

grep -inr "Text" folder/to/be/searched/

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • if you add -A3 is even better - anyone
  • -i is for case insensitive, -n shows the line number and -r recursive reads all the file in subdirectory - anyone

grep (GNU or BSD)

You can use grep tool to search recursively the current folder, like:

grep -r "class foo" .

Note: -r - Recursively search subdirectories.

You can also use globbing syntax to search within specific files such as:

grep "class foo" **/*.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 "*.php" -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 "class foo" .

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.

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • I also find extended globbing useful. But keep in mind that if there are really huge number of files, you can get a "Argument list too long" error. (Simple globbing is also prone to this kind of error). - anyone

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.

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • Which is what this command does: find will pass all the paths it finds to the command grep -l "text-to-find-here" <file found>". You may add restrictions to the file name, e.g. find / -iname "*.txt" to search only in files which name ends in .txt - anyone
  • @Auxiliary - included a sample output to avoid any confusion for the readers. - anyone
  • @Mene It's a truly sad state that Auxiliary's comment has more votes than yours...even if their comment is from 2014 and yours is 2017 that their comment has 6 when it should have exactly 0 and yours only had one (now two) isn't something I'd like to believe. - anyone
  • @Mene That being said -iname is case-insensitive which means it would also find .TXT files, for example, as well as TxT and TXt and so on. - anyone

This grep command will give you a precise result when you are searching for specific text on Linux -

grep -inRsH "Text to be searched" /path/to/dir (it can be '.')

  • i stands for ignore case distinctions

  • R stands for recursive and it also include symlinks. It is better to use 'R' instead of 'r'

  • n stands for "it will print line number".

  • s stands for "suppress error messages"

  • H stands for "it will print the file name for each match"

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • but this doesn't display the "file" that contains that text - anyone
  • this combination will give you lineno, filename along with the text that you have searched. @FiruzzZ try it once - anyone

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)

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • This is equivalent to grep 'text-to-find-here' without file name if find does not find anything. This will hang and wait for user input! Add --no-run-if-empty as an option to xargs. - anyone
  • This combination of find and xargs does not work as intended if file or directory names contain spaces (characters that xargs interprets as separators). Use find … -exec grep … +. If you insist on using find together with xargs, use -print0 and -0. - anyone

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!

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • Good call!. I downloaded it and used it first time. The output results are very informative and colourful and very helpfull. This prog will stay in my machine for ever. I have also put it on my "Install a new computer" list of programs. Cheers!! - anyone
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.

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • Can you explain how your answer improves upon the other answers, or how it is sufficiently different from them? - anyone
  • not much complex to remember, will cover all patterns(case-senstivity -> off, includes file-names and line number and will do recursively search etc) and using "*" in the end will search all directories (no need to specify any path or directory name). - anyone
  • Sorry, I should've been clearer: it would be great if you could include that explanation in your answer. As it stands, especially with so many other similar answers already, it is hard to see from such a short answer what the benefit of trying it over the accepted answer or one of the upvoted ones would be. - anyone
  • @AmosM.Carpenter One thing I love about this answer is pointing out the suppress argument, which can help filter out noise that doesn't matter to getting the results we actually want. Grep prints errors like, "Function not implemented", "Invalid Argument", "Resource unavailable", etc. etc on certain "files". - anyone
  • @leetNightshade: I'm assuming you're addressing your comment to me because I asked for an explanation on the sparse original post. Please see Fabio's great revision for my previous comments to make sense. - anyone

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>/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>/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>/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...

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

Use pwd to search from any directory you are in, recursing downward

grep -rnw `pwd` -e "pattern"

Depending on the version of grep you are using, you can omit pwd. In 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!

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • using pwd is not necessary at all, since it is the default. grep -rnw "pattern" suffices. - anyone
  • and in fact the grep -rnw and similar is what was answered like three years ago, I don't see how this answer is adding value. - anyone
  • The selected answer does not show the default pattern, and 5 peoples seemed to have found it useful - anyone
  • What do you mean with "default pattern"? The accepted answer contains grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern" which is what you have here. 5 votes after 2.3M visits does not mean that much. - anyone
  • I agree :-) what I was missing in the original answer is the use case that you don't have to give a path at all or to search the current directory recursively which is not reflected in the accepted answer. Thus it was a good learning experience about grep to dig a bit deeper. - anyone

Try:

find . -name "*.txt" | xargs grep -i "text_pattern"

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • This is actually a prime example of when NOT to use xargs like that .. consider this. echo "file bar.txt has bar" > bar.txt; echo "file foo bar.txt has foo bar" > "foo bar.txt"; echo "You should never see this foo" > foo; find . -name "*.txt" | xargs grep -i foo # ./foo:You should never see this foo . The xargs here matched the WRONG file and did NOT match the intended file. Either use a find .. -print0 | xargs -0 ... but that's a useless use of a pipe or better find ... -exec grep ... {} + - anyone
grep -lrnw '/root/Desktop/ipozal' -e 'geolocation'

For example:

  • my folder name is "ipozal"
  • it placed on "/root/Desktop"
  • I want to find this text on all files in it "geolocation"

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • Welcome to Stack Overflow! Please consider adding a description or explanation for this code block. - anyone
  • 1. backup your folder on desktop - anyone
  • 2. my project name is 'ipozal' - anyone
  • then use this command and replace 'ipozal' with your folder name, to find files that contains this text 'geolocation' - anyone
  • Good explanation -- you should edit your answer so that the explanation is included. - anyone

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.

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • I don't see how this is better than using a mere ls or find (for the recursive) - anyone

If you strictly want to use find then use find + grep:

find /path/to/somewhere/ -type f -exec grep -nw 'textPattern' {} \;

Steps:

  1. Use find to search files,
  2. 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.

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • What is the difference? Will it work with spaces in the file path? - anyone
  • Does not provide filenames of found files. - anyone

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

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

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

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

There is the ack tool that would do exactly what you are looking for:

ack -i search_string folder_path/*

You may ignore -i for case sensitive search.

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • What is this adding to the existing answers? This was suggested more than three years ago already. - anyone
  • @fedorqui 1)no piping! 2)Use regular expressions 3)Get line numbers, file name with relative path, highlighted text etc. useful for editing after the search e.g "vim +lineno path/file.cpp" will get you right at the line no of interest. See the output of the command "ack include\|hpp" that searches "include" or "hpp" keywords under my search folder and subfolders. I hope the point is clear. Here is the sample output(Can't show the keyword highlights with simple text) process/child.hpp 11:boost/process/child.hpp process/all.hpp 21:#include <boost/process/execute.hpp> - anyone

If you are in a Git repository, you can use:

git grep something

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • Out of curiosity, does this only check files that are checked into git and/or not in the .gitignore file? Just checking to be sure because I love how handy this is in most development situations where the directory is already a git repo. - anyone
  • @JoshuaPinter recorded an asciicinema for you asciinema.org/a/g92UTPtL929ysb8umqPj9e2SA the idea is that git grep searchs what's in git, either commited or stashed. When you ignore a file and it's not commited or stashed it's not going to appear in the git grep - anyone
  • @Dorian Excellent. Thanks for confirming this thought. That could be a nasty gotcha if you're not aware of it. Thanks again. - anyone

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...

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • This also works in Git Bash (Windows). - anyone
  • But it implies every file must searched (no filter on the file name or file extension level, like .txt). Or is there a way to do that? - anyone
grep "text-to-find-here" file_name

or

grep "text-to-find-here" directory_path/*

If you want to search the current directory:

grep "text-to-find-here" *

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • Make sure to add an -r switch after grep if you're looking recursively into sub directories. - anyone

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:

  1. . in the find specifies from the current directory.
  2. -name "*.*" : for all files ( -name "*.pas" -o -name "*.dfm" ) : Only the *.pas OR *.dfm files, OR specified with -o
  3. -type f specifies that you are looking for files
  4. -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.

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • -name '*.*' isn't what you say; it wouldn't pick up on a file called 'file' because the pattern doesn't equate to that (no .ext); * would however (well . files aside). But there's another thing: if you want all files why bother specifying a file name in the first place? No other comment - except that it's nice to know that there still are people who don't use the MS terminology 'folder' (which really after saying it enough I wouldn't add but I wanted to point out the slightly incorrect statement you made with file names - as well as the redundancy/uselessness in the case of 'all'). - anyone

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'

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

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

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

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' {} \;

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • Perhaps the details on differences of folders are obvious to many ...but also very helpful for newbies. +1 - anyone
  • what is this adding to the existing answers? - anyone
  • Call it my crusade but the word is 'directory'. This isn't Windows (which used to use 'directory' anyway - pre 9x). Please stop saying 'folder'. As for your last command you don't even need the '/' just FYI. - anyone

grep is your good friend to achieve this.

grep -r <text_fo_find> <directory>

If you don't care about the case of the text to find, then use:

grep -ir <text_to_find> <directory>

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • In my case it looks like it searches everywhere even if I do specify the directory - anyone
  • @Pathros Probably to do with recursion enabled and what directory you specify. Put another way recursion does change things in that way. - anyone
  • @Pathros Oh and if there are any - s in the search string you'll want to pass in -- to grep first; that can cause interesting side effects otherwise! - anyone

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" > /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" > /dev/null; then echo "$i"; \
fi; done;

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52

  • I see only downside compared to using find … -exec grep 'str' {} \; (if you have to use find at all). - anyone
  • This would break horribly if any of the files found by find contained spaces .. you could end up grepping the wrong files and/or missing the right files altogether. Just use find ... -exec grep ... if you have a need to use find .. but in this case a grep -r ... suffices. - anyone
  • what is the point of using a loop over the results of find to then grep? This gets unnecessarily complicated. - anyone

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.

Answered   2023-09-20 19:54:52