Grep Recursive and Count

Question

Need to search a directories with lots of sub-directories for a string inside files:

I'm using:

grep -c -r "string here" *

How can I total count of finds?

How can I output to file only those files with at least one instance?

Answer 1

Using Bash's process substitution, this gives what I believe is the output you want? (Please clarify the question if it's not.)

grep -r "string here" * | tee >(wc -l)

This runs grep -r normally, with output going both to stdout and to a wc -l process.

Answer 2

It works for me (it gets the total number of 'string here' found in each file). However, it does not display the total for ALL files searched. Here is how you can get it:

grep -c -r 'string' file > out && \
    awk -F : '{total += $2} END { print "Total:", total }' out

The list will be in out and the total will be sent to STDOUT.

Here is the output on the Python2.5.4 directory tree:

grep -c -r 'import' Python-2.5.4/ > out && \
    awk -F : '{total += $2} END { print "Total:", total }' out
Total: 11500

$ head out
Python-2.5.4/Python/import.c:155
Python-2.5.4/Python/thread.o:0
Python-2.5.4/Python/pyarena.c:0
Python-2.5.4/Python/getargs.c:0
Python-2.5.4/Python/thread_solaris.h:0
Python-2.5.4/Python/dup2.c:0
Python-2.5.4/Python/getplatform.c:0
Python-2.5.4/Python/frozenmain.c:0
Python-2.5.4/Python/pyfpe.c:0
Python-2.5.4/Python/getmtime.c:0

If you just want to get lines with occurrences of 'string', change to this:

grep -c -r 'import' Python-2.5.4/ | \
    awk -F : '{total += $2; print $1, $2} END { print "Total:", total }'

That will output:

[... snipped]
Python-2.5.4/Lib/dis.py 4
Python-2.5.4/Lib/mhlib.py 10
Python-2.5.4/Lib/decimal.py 8
Python-2.5.4/Lib/new.py 6
Python-2.5.4/Lib/stringold.py 3
Total: 11500

You can change how the files ($1) and the count per file ($2) is printed.