CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashshellloopsif-statementgrep
Danellb
Danellb

Reputation: 55

Copy files that have at least the mention of one certain word

I want to look through 100K+ text files from a directory and copy to another directory only the ones which contain at least one word from a list.

I tried doing an if statement with grep and cp but I have no idea how to make it to work this way.

for filename in *.txt 
do 
grep -o -i "cultiv" "protec" "agricult" $filename|wc -w 
if [ wc -gt 0 ]
then cp $filename ~/desktop/filepath
fi 
done

Obviously this does not work but I have no idea how to store the wc result and then compare it to 0 and only act on those files.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 94

Answers (1)

Barmar
Barmar

Reputation: 781096

Use the -l option to have grep print all the filenames that match the pattern. Then use xargs to pass these as arguments to cp.

grep -l -E -i 'cultiv|protec|agricult' *.txt | xargs cp -t ~/desktop/filepath --

The -t option is a GNU cp extension, it allows you to put the destination directory first so that it will work with xargs.

If you're using a version without that option, you need to use the -J option to xargs to substitute in the middle of the command.

grep -l -E -i 'cultiv|protec|agricult' *.txt | xargs -J {} cp -- {} ~/desktop/filepath

Upvotes: 3

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