Find all files matching 'name' on linux system, and search with them for 'text'

Question

I need to find all instances of 'filename.ext' on a linux system and see which ones contain the text 'lookingfor'.

Is there a set of linux command line operations that would work?

Solution 1

find / -type f -name filename.ext -exec grep -l 'lookingfor' {} +

Using a + to terminate the command is more efficient than \; because find sends a whole batch of files to grep instead of sending them one by one. This avoids a fork/exec for each single file which is found.

A while ago I did some testing to compare the performance of xargs vs {} + vs {} \; and I found that {} + was faster. Here are some of my results:

time find . -name "*20090430*" -exec touch {} +
real    0m31.98s
user    0m0.06s
sys     0m0.49s

time find . -name "*20090430*" | xargs touch
real    1m8.81s
user    0m0.13s
sys     0m1.07s

time find . -name "*20090430*" -exec touch {} \;
real    1m42.53s
user    0m0.17s
sys     0m2.42s

Solution 2

Go to respective directory and type the following command.

find . -name "*.ext" | xargs grep 'lookingfor'

Solution 3

A more simple one would be,

find / -type f -name filename.ext -print0 | xargs -0 grep  'lookingfor'

-print0 to find & 0 to xargs would mitigate the issue of large number of files in a single directory.

Solution 4

I find the following command the simplest way:

grep -R --include="filename.ext" lookingfor

or add -i to search case insensitive:

grep -i -R --include="filename.ext" lookingfor

Solution 5

Try:

find / -type f -name filename.ext -exec grep -H -n 'lookingfor' {} \;

find searches recursively starting from the root / for files named filename.ext and for every found occurrence it runs grep on the file name searching for lookingfor and if found prints the line number (-n) and the file name (-H).

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Comments

[Didier Trosset]

Given the huge number of files, it is much more efficient to use xargs that will start grep only once, as in digen's answer.

[Didier Trosset]

-print0 and -0 has nothing to do with the large number of files. It ensures that find | xargs works when some file have space characters in their names.

[digen]

Didier you're absolutely right in this,here is the excerpt from the man page for everyone else, -print0 True; print the full file name on the standard output, followed by a null character (instead of the newline character that -print uses). This allows file names that contain newlines or other types of white space to be correctly interpreted by pro‐ grams that process the find output. This option corresponds to the -0 option of xargs.

[Alexandre]

I'd only add the --color to grep, I believe it is a lot easier to see things. Actually, I just realized it doesn't take the alias I defined in .bashrc.