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

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

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

Solution 3

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.

Comments

[user50946]

as I said I have no idea about directory

[James L]

updated with the root directory. It will take a long time though.

[user50946]

I did what you said but there are a lots of records..is there any way to save this to text file?

[James L]

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]

Does this add any functionality over grep's recursive flag?

[Femil Shajin]

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

[pauska]

I'm also a pipe abuser. Once you're used to it it's hard to stop!

[Richard Holloway]

My servers cost enough money and do so little in return, what is a few extra processes here and there? :)

[Richard Holloway]

ack is great. You can install it on CentOS from the rpmforge repo. See rpmrepo.org/RPMforge/Using for details on how to set this up.