#SEARCH ALL FILES FOR TEXT LINUIX HOW TO#

you might want to use -col flag to colorcode your output which searching files containing specific strings. Now what if you are searching through a massive file and there might be many outputs similar to what you’re looking for. You can search for a text string all files under each directory, recursively with -r option: grep -r 'PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START' grep -R 'PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START' files containing specific text with color output If you don’t know the exact location of the file that contains the specific text you’re looking for, then you need to search all subdirectories recursively. Grep: /etc/default/kdm.d: Is a Find files containing specific text when you don’t know the location

If you know the exact location and directory you’re after, then use grep 'PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START' you know the exact directory with the files containing that specific text, then use grep 'PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START' /etc/default/* Find files containing specific text when you know the location So I will outline all possible combinations, you can just try one at a time to determine which one best suites you. Now there’s a small problem, depending on your Linux, BSD or Unix distro, Find command can be slightly different (in terms of Syntaxes). In this example, we will search for 'PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START‘ in all configuration files located in /etc directory. OR egrep -w -R 'word-1|word-2” directory-path Find files containing specific text using grep command examples OR egrep -R 'word-1|word-2” directory-path OR grep -r -H 'text string to search” directory-path OR grep -r 'text string to search” directory-path OR grep 'text string to search” directory-path Syntax for grep command is simple: grep 'text string to search” directory-path The grep command can find and search a specific text from all files quickly.

To find files containing specific text, you are possibly better off using the grep command. Its name comes from the ed command g/re/p (globally search a regular expression and print), which has the same effect: doing a global search with the regular expression and printing all matching lines. Grep was originally developed for the Unix operating system, but is available today for all Unix-like systems. Grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines matching a regular expression. This guide will work for any Linux distributions, namely –įind files containing specific text using grep command This guide shows a bunch of commands that you can use to find files containing specific text in Linux, namely Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, CentOS, Fedora and any Linux distro. I’ve been there when I started with Slackware back late nineties. For a new Linux user, yeah tell me about it. Now for an experienced user, no problem, you know exactly where to find a configuration file for PulseAudio. This is particularly important when you’re tying to follow a badly written guide of forum post that says something like replace 0 with 1 in this line which will fix PulseAudio configured for per-user sessions … (warning) PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START=0 Very often new users would dwell on Google trying to find the correct command to find files containing specific text. So this will match conffff, myconf, myconfffff, myconfiguration.txt etc. We will use the glob start and end of the search term in order to accept any prefix or postfix for the search term. We will search files those named conf in this example. We can search only files by providing file type as -type f. Linux Find Command With Examples Find Only Files More details about find command can be found from the following tutorial. Here list of these tools.įindcommand is very featureful command used with a lot of different options. Tools To Find Files and Folder In LinuxĪs stated previously there are a lot of tools that can be used to find files and folders.

#SEARCH ALL FILES FOR TEXT LINUIX HOW TO#

In this tutorial, we will look at how to find files, folders, and directories from the command line. We can use GUI tools like GNOME and KDE file managers or other 3’rd party applications designed for finding files. Linux provides different ways to find and locate files and folders.

Search all files for text linuix