Find all directories containing a file that contains a keyword in linux

Question

In my hierarchy of directories I have many text files called STATUS.txt. These text files each contain one keyword such as COMPLETE, WAITING, FUTURE or OPEN. I wish to execute a shell command of the following form:

./mycommand OPEN

which will list all the directories that contain a file called STATUS.txt, where this file contains the text "OPEN"

In future I will want to extend this script so that the directories returned are sorted. Sorting will determined by a numeric value stored the file PRIORITY.txt, which lives in the same directories as STATUS.txt. However, this can wait until my competence level improves. For the time being I am happy to list the directories in any order.

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I have tried the following shell commands:

This helps me identify all the directories that contain STATUS.txt

$ find ./ -name STATUS.txt

This reads STATUS.txt for every directory that contains it

$ find ./ -name STATUS.txt | xargs -I{} cat {}

This doesn't return any text, I was hoping it would return the name of each directory

$ find . -type d | while read d; do if [ -f STATUS.txt ]; then echo "${d}"; fi; done

Answer 1

... or the other way around:

find . -name "STATUS.txt" -exec grep -lF "OPEN" \{} +

If you want to wrap that in a script, a good starting point might be:

#!/bin/sh

[ $# -ne 1 ] && echo "One argument required" >&2 && exit 2
find . -name "STATUS.txt" -exec grep -lF "$1" \{} +

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As pointed out by @BroSlow, if you are looking for directories containing the matching STATUS.txt files, this might be more what you are looking for:

fgrep --include='STATUS.txt' -rl 'OPEN' | xargs -L 1 dirname 

Or better

fgrep --include='STATUS.txt' -rl 'OPEN' |
           sed -e 's|^[^/]*$|./&|' -e 's|/[^/]*$||'
#              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
#            simulate `xargs -L 1 dirname` using `sed`  
#      (no trailing `\`; returns `.` for path without dir part)                   

Answer 2

Maybe you can try this:

grep -rl "OPEN" . --include='STATUS.txt'| sed 's/STATUS.txt//'

where grep -r means recursive , -l means only list the files matching, '.' is the directory location. You can pipe it to sed to remove the file name.

You can then wrap this in a bash script file where you can pass in keywords such as 'OPEN', 'FUTURE' as an argument.

#!/bin/bash
grep -rl "$1" . --include='STATUS.txt'| sed 's/STATUS.txt//'