How to grep for the whole word

Question

I am using the following command to grep stuff in subdirs

find . | xargs grep -s 's:text' 

However, this also finds stuff like <s:textfield name="sdfsf"...../>

What can I do to avoid that so it just finds stuff like <s:text name="sdfsdf"/>

OR for that matter....also finds <s:text somethingElse="lkjkj" name="lkkj"

basically s:text and name should be on same line....

Answer 1

You want the -w option to specify that it's the end of a word.

find . | xargs grep -sw 's:text'

Answer 2

Use \b to match on "word boundaries", which will make your search match on whole words only.

So your grep would look something like

grep -r "\bSTRING\b" 

adding color and line numbers might help too

grep --color -rn "\bSTRING\b" 

From http://www.regular-expressions.info/wordboundaries.html:

There are three different positions that qualify as word boundaries:

• Before the first character in the string, if the first character is a word character.
• After the last character in the string, if the last character is a word character.
• Between two characters in the string, where one is a word character and the other is not a word character.