CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashgrep
Goga Benton
Goga Benton

Reputation: 61

Bash. Finding specific text in files using find, cat and grep

I have thousands of folders filled with old junk that I need to make sense of. Namely I need to find all files containing specific text in files using mask. But if I do it using grep -R "mask" it churns all that junk and machine is stuck as a result. I want to pipe find and cat results to grep but can't find right way.

a=$(find ./ -name "*.txt")
for i in $a; do
  cat $i | grep "string" >> result.txt
done

Something like that, but it doesn't seems to work. Where am I stupid?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3608

Answers (1)

axiac
axiac

Reputation: 72366

You don't need cat.
grep "string" $i is faster.

You don't need find either.

The command you need is:

grep -r -l "string" --include="*.txt" .

It runs faster than any combination of find and grep because it runs only one process.

The arguments:

  • -r tells grep to process the input directory (.) recursively.
  • -l tells it to suppress its normal output and echo only the name of the matching files. It runs faster because it stops on the first match in each file.
  • "string" is the text you are searching.
  • --include="*.txt" limits the search to the files whose name match the pattern. The quotes around *.txt" are needed; without them the shell expands *.txt to the list of matching files in the current directory.
  • . is the directory where to search for files; the current directory in this example.

Upvotes: 3

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