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I need to find all instances of 'filename.ext' on a linux system and see which ones contain the text 'lookingfor'.
Is there a set of linux command line operations that would work?
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Without a doubt, grep is the best command to search a file (or files) for a specific text. By default, it returns all the lines of a file that contain a certain string. This behavior can be changed with the -l option, which instructs grep to only return the file names that contain the specified text.
Search All Files in Directory To search all files in the current directory, use an asterisk instead of a filename at the end of a grep command. The output shows the name of the file with nix and returns the entire line.
find / -type f -name filename.ext -exec grep -l 'lookingfor' {} + Using a + to terminate the command is more efficient than \; because find sends a whole batch of files to grep instead of sending them one by one. This avoids a fork/exec for each single file which is found.
A while ago I did some testing to compare the performance of xargs vs {} + vs {} \; and I found that {} + was faster. Here are some of my results:
time find . -name "*20090430*" -exec touch {} + real 0m31.98s user 0m0.06s sys 0m0.49s time find . -name "*20090430*" | xargs touch real 1m8.81s user 0m0.13s sys 0m1.07s time find . -name "*20090430*" -exec touch {} \; real 1m42.53s user 0m0.17s sys 0m2.42s If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
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