How-To Geek
Find files containing search terms on Ubuntu
To find files containing keywords, linux has a powerful command called grep, which you can use to find the lines inside any file or a list of files. I use this very often to find a function declaration in a set of php files that I’m unfamiliar with.
Let’s say we are looking for the definition of a function called wp_content_filterize, and we don’t know where to start. Let’s try using grep…
grep -i -n ‘function wp_content_filterize’ *
We should see the output right on the console
functions.php:18:function wp_content_filterize($thefilter) {
Now we know that the function definition is found in the file functions.php, on line 18.
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Comments (11)
Programmer by day, geek by night, The Geek, also known as Lowell Heddings, spends all his free time bringing you fresh geekery on a daily basis. You can follow him on Google+ if you'd like.
- Published 09/11/06
find . -name “filenames” -exec grep -i -H -n ‘texttofind’ {} \;
To search within sub-directories
I use windows 2000 and xp. I need a way to search withing a list of text files for a specific number. I want to then take the search results and output the lines of text containing this number to a text file, or possibly an html document that will then open up. Basically, I need to output the results into some form of data that I can easily read. Are there any free programs that I can use to do this or do you have any ideas?
Now i’m using UBUNTU-LINUX, but before -when i worked in winXP- one of my preferred applications were Agent Ransack (freeware). Here is its offcial webpage:
http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/
This application is the only i would like to have in UBUNTU. Once it is installed, you simply do click with secondary button mouse over a directory and click on “Search with Agent Ransack”, and… fantastic: it find very rapidly all files (indicating the exact line) wich contains the string you search!!
I would like to know if exists some like this for UBUNTU ;)))
SERGIO R.
Eyyyy… i found it.
Great application for developers (indeed for UBUNTU):
http://regexxer.sourceforge.net
;)
SERGIO
@Sergio:
That’s a really awesome find! I’ve always wanted an app like that… will be featuring an article about it.
how do I find some text only in some specific files in a directory, lets say I want grep to look only in .c files only ?
@Ajo :
In fact you can use -R option on grep to do it recursively (maybe it’s a recent thing, this post is back to 2007, I know)
grep -R ‘pattern’ *
I used grep years ago, but I can’t make it work today:
I can’t understand why this doesn’t work:
grep -r keyword *.java
The error message says that *.java is not a file !
This used to work 30 years ago.
After issuing the command you can do
vi “filename” + “linenumber”
to open the file in the position of the occurrence
use ack-grep
you can also use: grep -R -i -n ‘function wp_content_filterize’ * to search subdirectories