Search words in file linux

Linux find text in files

Posted on February 12, 2016 By Nikola Stojanoski

If you need to find text in file or multiple files on a Linux system you can use grep (global regular expression print) in a very efficient way to do so. Here are few examples that I commonly use.

Find text in files into a directory

Use this command to find the text you are looking for within the directory

If you want to select only those lines containing matches that form whole words use the -w switch (–word-regexp). If you search for “word” this will NOT display words like someword, word123, etc.

If you don’t know the capitalization of words and want to ignore case distinctions use the -i switch (–ignore-case). If you search for “word” it will display Word, WORD, word, wORD, etc.

And the most often used command for me is recursive search -r switch (–recursive)

And finally few examples that i use the most

1. Find text in files recursive

Invoke -w (–word-regexp) and -r (–recursive) switch:

2. Find text in files case insensitive and recursive

Invoke -i (–ignore-case) and -r (–recursive) switch

3. Find multiple words in files

To find two different words you must use egrep

This days i use this to search trough logs, mostly apache, nginx and mail logs.

Also don’t forget to use zgrep. Zgrep invokes grep on compressed or gzipped files. All options specified are passed directly to grep.

For this we will use grep case insensitive because sometimes mail addresses can have Capital letters in the user First and Last Names.

This will output file and date when the mail was sent to the user, and than you can grep the time to get all the logs for that time:

You can now easy look at the log:

This ware just few command i usually use, look at the man page for more options.

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How to Find a Specific String or Word in Files and Directories

Do you want to find all files that contain a particular word or string of text on your entire Linux system or a given directory. This article will guide you on how to do that, you will learn how to recursively dig through directories to find and list all files that contain a given string of text.

A simple way to work this out is by using grep pattern searching tool, is a powerful, efficient, reliable and most popular command-line utility for finding patterns and words from files or directories on Unix-like systems.

The command below will list all files containing a line with the text “check_root”, by recursively and aggressively searching the

Find a Word in Directory

Where the -R option tells grep to read all files under each directory, recursively, following symbolic links only if they are on the command line and option -w instructs it to select only those lines containing matches that form whole words, and -e is used to specify the string (pattern) to be searched.

You should use the sudo command when searching certain directories or files that require root permissions (unless you are managing your system with the root account).

To ignore case distinctions employ the -i option as shown:

If you want to know the exact line where the string of text exist, include the -n option.

Find String with Line Number

Assuming there are several types of files in a directory you wish to search in, you can also specify the type of files to be searched for instance, by their extension using the —include option.

This example instructs grep to only look through all .sh files.

In addition, it is possible to search for more than one pattern, using the following command.

Find Multiple Words in Files

That’s It! If you know any other command-line trick to find string or word in files, do share with us or ask any questions regarding this topic, use the comment form below.

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Find Files Containing Specific Text in Linux

Linux, regardless of the distro you use, comes with a number of GUI tools which allow searching for files. Many modern file managers support file searching right in the file list. However, most of them do not allow you to search inside a file’s contents. Here are two methods you can use to search for file contents in Linux.

I would like to share the methods I use myself.
The first method involves the grep utility, which exists in any distro, even in embedded systems built on busybox.

To find files containing specific text in Linux, do the following.

1. Open your favorite terminal app. XFCE4 terminal is my personal preference.
2. Navigate (if required) to the folder in which you are going to search files with some specific text.
3. Type the following command:

Here are the switches:
-i — ignore text case
-R — recursively search files in subdirectories.
-l — show file names instead of file contents portions.

./ — the last parameter is the path to the folder containing files you need to search for your text. In our case, it is the current folder with the file mask. You can change it to the full path of the folder. For example, here is my command

Note: Other useful switches you might want to use with grep:
-n — show the line number.
-w — match the whole word.

Another method I use is Midnight Commander (mc), the console file manager app. Unlike grep, mc is not included by default in all Linux distros I’ve tried. You may need to install it yourself.

Find files containing specific text with mc

To find files containing some specific text using Midnight Commander, start the app and press the following sequence on the keyboard:
Alt + Shift + ?
This will open the search dialog.

Fill in the «Content:» section and press the Enter key. It will find all files with the required text.

You can place these files in the left or right panel using the Panelize option and copy/move/delete/view/do whatever you want them.

Midnight Commander is a very time-saving tool when it comes to search.

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6 thoughts on “ Find Files Containing Specific Text in Linux ”

The code that you provided helped me. There are also another commands which I cannot remember to find text in files but this one is made it quickly. I have bookmarked this post for further usage. Thank you.

WHAT ABOUT WINDOWS?!

I use Total Commander for that.

Midnight Commander reminds me of XTree for DOS way, evidently, way way, back in the day!! 🙂 Anyone else remember!?

It reminds me of Norton Commander. Good days.

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Finding a File Containing a Particular Text String In Linux Server

Tutorial details
Difficulty level	Easy
Root privileges	No
Requirements	grep
Est. reading time	Less than 2 minutes

You need to use the grep command. The grep command or egrep command searches the given input FILEs for lines containing a match or a text string.

grep command syntax for finding a file containing a particular text string

The syntax is:
grep » text string to search » directory-path
grep [option] » text string to search » directory-path
grep -r » text string to search «directory-path
grep -r -H » text string to search » directory-path
egrep -R » word-1|word-2 » /path/to/directory
egrep -w -R » word-1|word-2 » directory-path
Let us see some common example on how to use grep to search for strings in files.

How to search and find all files for a given text string

In this example, search for a string called ‘redeem reward’ in all text (*.txt) files located in /home/tom/ directory, use:
$ grep «redeem reward» /home/tom/*.txt
OR
$ grep «redeem reward»

Task: Search all subdirectories recursively

You can search for a text string all files under each directory, recursively with -r option:
$ grep -r «redeem reward» /home/tom/
OR
$ grep -R «redeem reward» /home/tom/
Look for all files containing cacheRoot text on Linux:
grep -R cacheRoot /home/vivek/

Trying to find all files containing specific text on my Linux desktop

Task: Only display filenames

By default, the grep command prints the matching lines. You can pass -H option to print the filename for each match:
$ grep -H -r «redeem reward» /home/tom
Sample outputs:

To just display the filename use the cut command as follows:
$ grep -H -R vivek /etc/* | cut -d: -f1
Sample outputs:

Task: Suppress file names

The grep command shows output on a separate line, and it is preceded by the name of the file in which it was found in the case of multiple files. You can pass the -h option to suppress inclusion of the file names in the output:
$ grep -h -R ‘main()’

Task: Display only words

You can select only those lines containing matches that form whole words using the -w option. In this example, search for word ‘getMyData()’ only in

/projects/ dirctory:
$ grep -w -R ‘getMyData()’

Task: Search for two or more words

Use the egrep command as follows:
$ egrep -w -R ‘word1|word2’

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Task: Hide warning spam

grep command generate error message as follows due to permission and other issues:

No such file or directory
No such device or address
Permission denied

To hide all errors or warning message spam generated by the grep command, append 2>/dev/null to grep command. This will send and hide unwanted output to /dev/null device:
$ grep -w -R ‘getMyData()’

Task: Display matched text in color

Pass the —color option to the grep command display matched text/words in color on the terminal:

Fig.01: grep command in action with colors and hiding the warnings on screen

Task: Ignore case

Our final example ignore case distinctions in both the search PATTERN and the input files:
grep -i -R ‘word’ /path/to/dir
grep -i -r ‘income tax’

How do I find all files containing specific text on Linux?

The syntax is:
egrep ‘pattern’ -rnw /path/to/dir/
egrep ‘word1|word2’ -rnw /home/vivek/backups/

Finding text strings within files using grep

In this example search for lines starting with any lowercase or uppercase letter:
grep «^[a-zA-Z]» -rns

• -r – Recursive search
• -R – Read all files under each directory, recursively. Follow all symbolic links, unlike -r grep option
• -n – Display line number of each matched line
• -s – Suppress error messages about nonexistent or unreadable files
• -w – Only work on words i.e. search only those lines containing matches that form whole words
• -l – Show the name of each input file when match found
• -i – Ignore case while searching

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linux + find word in file under directory but quickly

I have the following command

With this command I can find the param1 string in any file under /var

but the time that it take for this is very long.

I need other possibility to find string in file but much more faster then my example

6 Answers 6

The find is not neccesary.

This is a good link, though outdated.

Also i think this belongs in superuser.com

Take a look at the -l option to the grep command for a speed boost. To speed up the find command use:

would be slightly faster (no process spawning for each file)

would be slightly more so I think.

Try also using ack, which is «better than grep» in most cases. Among its features the ability to ignore typical garbage files by default (such as .svn or .git directories, core dumps, backup files), the ability to use a large set of predefined file classes, nice output formatting.

You can use locate’s index (if you don’t depend on files that are added/removed)

some of these command optimizations are helpful, but the biggest jump in speed I got from grepping 2 million files was to use a SSD Hard drive. Same queries took 1/5 of the time.

Not the answer you’re looking for? Browse other questions tagged linux bash or ask your own question.

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