How to use the grep with globs patterns? (like we use it in find command)

Question

Let's see if we want to find all file name as below format

gstreamer_abc.c
gstreamer_xyz.c
gstreamer_abcxyz.c

then we can use find command as below

find ./ -iname "gstreamer_*.c"

Same way i need to grep some APIs in file as below

gstABCNode()
gstAnythingCanBeHereNode()
gstXyzNode()

I am trying something

grep -rni "gst*Node"  ./
grep -rni "gst^\*Node" ./

But it does not gives what i need here. First is it possible to search with grep like this or if possible then how to grep such pattern?

`find . -type f -exec grep -rni pattern {} /dev/null \;` (or use -H) — William Pursell, Jul 13 '21 at 10:49
Does this answer your question? [Find files containing a given text](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6153152/find-files-containing-a-given-text) — 0stone0, Jul 13 '21 at 10:58

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 13 '21 at 10:51

1

You can grep only these files:

grep --include "gstreamer_*.c" -rni "gst*Node"  ./

answered Jul 13 '21 at 10:51

KamilCuk

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 13 '21 at 10:57

Your problem is that find uses "globs" while grep uses regular expressions. With find, * means "a string of any length". With grep, * means "any number of times the element (character) that precedes". This way, your command:

grep -rni "gst*Node"  ./

searches for any string that starts with gs, any number of times t, and Node (which is presumably not what you want). Try rather:

grep -rni "gst.*Node"  ./

The . means "any character", so .* really means "a string of any length".

How to use the grep with globs patterns? (like we use it in find command)

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