Linux: find file by content

with grep:

How to find all files containing specific text (string) on Linux - Stack Overflow

Do the following:

grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e 'pattern'

• -r or -R is recursive, ==> see comment below: -r is dfs-lazy, -R is greedy
• -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/somewhere/' -e "pattern"

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

For more options, see man grep.

Share

edited Jul 5 at 8:05

Mateen Ulhaq

• use --exclude. like "grep -rnw --exclude=*.o 'directory' -e "pattern" 

  – rakib_

  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). 

• – Eliran Malka

  Note(especially for newbies): The quotation marks in the above command are important. 

• – madD7

follow up: edit all found files with 'xargs' and 'sed'

from: How to replace a string in multiple files in linux command line - Stack Overflow

simple soln. 

cd /path/to/your/folder
sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' *

Occurrences of "foo" will be replaced with "bar".

On BSD systems like macOS, you need to provide a backup extension like -i '.bak' or else "risk corruption or partial content" per the manpage.

cd /path/to/your/folder
sed -i '.bak' 's/foo/bar/g' *

 a much better soln.

@kev's answer is good, but only affects files in the immediate directory.The example below uses grep to recursively find files. It works for me everytime.

grep -rli 'old-word' * | xargs -i@ sed -i 's/old-word/new-word/g' @

---

Command breakdown

grep -r: --recursive, recursively read all files under each directory.
grep -l: --print-with-matches, prints the name of each file that has a match, instead of printing matching lines.
grep -i: --ignore-case. 

xargs: transform the STDIN to arguments, follow this answer.
xargs -i@ ~command contains @~: a placeholder for the argument to be used in a specific position in the ~command~, the @ sign is a placeholder which could replaced by any string.

sed -i: edit files in place, without backups.
sed s/regexp/replacement/: substitute string matching regexp with replacement.
sed s/regexp/replacement/g: global, make the substitution for each match instead of only the first match.