CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxgrep
lonely
lonely

Reputation: 53

search a string in a file with case insensitive file name

I want to grep for a string in all the files which have a particular patter in their name and is case-insensitive.

For eg if I have two files ABC.txt and aBc.txt, then I want something like

grep -i 'test' *ABC*

The above command should look in both the files.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1459

Answers (2)

diwhyyyyy
diwhyyyyy

Reputation: 6372

You can use find and then grep on the results of that:

find . -iname "*ABC*" -exec grep -i "test" {} \;

Note that this will run grep once on each file found. If you want to run grep once on all the files (in which case you risk running into the command line length limit), you can use a plus at the end:

find . -iname "*ABC*" -exec grep -i "test" {} \+

You can also use xargs to process a really large number of results more efficiently:

find . -iname "*ABC*" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -i test

The -print0 makes find output 0-terminated results, and the -0 makes xargs able to deal with this format, which means you don't need to worry about any special characters in the filenames. However, it is not totally portable, since it's a GNU extension.

If you don't have a find that supports -print0 (for example SVR4), you can still use -exec as above or just

find . -iname "*ABC*" | xargs grep -i test

But you should be sure your filenames don't have newlines in them, otherwise xargs will treat each line of a filename as a new argument.

Upvotes: 1

gehan
gehan

Reputation: 19

You should use find to match file and search string that you want with command grep which support regular expression, for your question, you should input command like below:

find . -name "*ABC*" -exec grep \<test\> {} \;

Upvotes: 0

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