#Command line find word in file how to
#Command line find word in file full
#Command line find word in file windows

#Command line find word in file how to

I recommend reading How do I use man pages to learn how to use commands?. Once you do know the command name, you can look up its documentation with the man command, for example man grep or man find. There are ways to search the documentation of a command on your system, but they're typically less effective: you already have to have some idea of what you're looking for. In general, if you're looking for a command to do something, a web search is your best friend.

If you want to search for “idle” in any case ( Idle, IDLE, iDle, …), pass -i: grep -i idle * If you want to search only for the word “idle”, and not when it's a substring of a word such as “idled” or “sidle”, pass the -w option to grep: grep -w idle * See sourcejedi's very good answer on this topic. If you want to look for files on your whole system, you can use grep -r idle /īut this will search through many system files, so you probably don't want this. Here we don't rely on the shell to list files, since grep will do it on its own. This command doesn't search files in subdirectories to do that: grep -r idle. * does exclude dot files but that's a story for another time.

#Command line find word in file windows

(unlike Windows where there's special magic for this pattern for historical reasons). Lose the habit of writing *.*: that excludes files whose name contains a. This is one of a very few things that works mostly (but not exactly) the same in Windows. The * character is a wildcard pattern which is expanded by the shell to the list of files in the current directory. To look for files containing the string idle in the current directory: grep idle * Its main focus is to search inside files, but modern versions of grep can be instructed to automatically traverse directories and search inside all the files in them. The Unix command to search file contents is grep. The Unix find utility searches for files based on their metadata: name, location, modification time, etc. Your question was originally poorly received here because nobody imagined that you expected a command called find to search the contents of a file. On the other hand, there are a lot of commonalities between Unix variants such as Linux and macOS, and knowledge on one will help you with the others.īy coincidence, both Windows and Linux have a utility called find. Knowledge of Windows command line utilities won't help you on Unix and vice versa. The Windows command line and the Unix command line are completely different. Using + specifically passes a batch of file names at once, which is more efficient. instead.įind -type f filters out directories and some other special files.įind -exec allows running another program with the file names. If /home is a different filesystem, you might want find / /home -xdev. $ find path-a path-bįind: ‘path-a’: No such file or directoryįind: ‘path-b’: No such file or directoryįind -xdev avoids crossing into a different filesystem, e.g. find path-a path-b lists all files under path-a and path-b, which are expected to exist.

#Command line find word in file full

find / -name idle will find files named idle and print their full path. If you don't have a very specific aim like that, don't put the * on the end.įind doesn't search strings in text files. * would skip 'hidden' files and directories that are at the top level. If you need to search under /, you want something like: find / -xdev -type f -exec grep -H idle '' + It might get stuck, take a long time, or just include results from special types of files that you're not interested in. You don't want to search files in the virtual filesystem /proc, for example. That's valid, but you'll probably notice a problem.