How do I find a word recursively in all files and all directories

Question

I am looking for a specific phrase in CentOS and I am not sure where and which file or even directory that has the file is. How can I do a complete recursive search on a phrase. Thanks

score 16 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 24 '10 at 13:44

16

man grep
For this example, grep -i -R "your phrase" directory
-i means case insensitive
-R means recursively

If you don't know which directory, use / - but be prepared for it to take a long time.

answered Sep 24 '10 at 13:44

James L

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as I said I have no idea about directory – user50946 Sep 24 '10 at 13:45
updated with the root directory. It will take a long time though. – James L Sep 24 '10 at 13:46
I did what you said but there are a lots of records..is there any way to save this to text file? – user50946 Sep 24 '10 at 13:49
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read about piping and redirects. > saves to a file, >> appends to a file, and | pipes to a process. So, in this case, `grep -i -R "your phrase" directory > /path/to/your/textfile` - also consider adding -l to the grep arguments if you just want a list of the files (as per @Richard Holloway – James L Sep 24 '10 at 13:50
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you can redirect the output to a file with `grep -i -R "your phrase" directory > myfile.txt`, or you could use less to view the result with `grep -i -R "your phrase" directory | less` – Avada Kedavra Sep 24 '10 at 13:52
Make sure the file you are redirecting your output to isn't in the search path, or grep will find its own output. Recursion is only fun the first million times. – jmanning2k Sep 24 '10 at 17:19

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 24 '10 at 13:45

4

You can use this one liner to get a list of all files in this folder and sub folders, containing the phrase "The phrase I am looking for".

  find . -print0 | xargs -0 grep "The phrase I am looking for" -l

answered Sep 24 '10 at 13:45

Richard Holloway

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Does this add any functionality over grep's recursive flag? – James L Sep 24 '10 at 13:52
@James: No. I use it mainly to get the extra find functionality like specifying file name extensions (with -name "*.php" for example) and so on but in this example it adds nothing. – Richard Holloway Sep 24 '10 at 13:57
I'm also a pipe abuser. Once you're used to it it's hard to stop! – pauska Sep 24 '10 at 14:20
My servers cost enough money and do so little in return, what is a few extra processes here and there? :) – Richard Holloway Sep 24 '10 at 15:41

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 24 '10 at 16:39

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I would recommend ack.

Go to the uppermost level directory that you dare searching and then type:

ack -a "Phrase"

I don't really use grep anymore because of ack.

answered Sep 24 '10 at 16:39

Christopher Bottoms

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ack is great. You can install it on CentOS from the rpmforge repo. See http://rpmrepo.org/RPMforge/Using for details on how to set this up. – Richard Holloway Sep 24 '10 at 19:52

How do I find a word recursively in all files and all directories

3 Answers3