How to find a text file which contains a specific word inside (not in its name)

Question

I want to find a text file in my hard disk which contains a specific word.

Prior to Ubuntu 12.4 I used to start in the dash an application, I think it was called "Search for file...", whose icon was a magnifying glass.I can't find that simple application any more.

Solution 1

You can use the grep command from terminal:

 grep -r word *

This command will find all occurrences of "word" in all the files under the current directory (or subdrectories).

Solution 2

Install gnome-search-tool.

sudo apt-get install gnome-search-tool

Open Search for files select Select More Options and

---

Solution 3

Here's an overview of different methods that one can use for searching files for specific strings of text, with a few options added specifically to work only with text files, and ignore binary/application files.

One should note,however,that searching for word can get a little complex, because most line-matching tools will try to find a word anywhere on the line. If we're talking about a word as string that could appear in the beginning or end of line, or alone on the line, or surrounded by spaces and/or punctuation - that's when we'll need regular expressions, and especially those that come from Perl. Here, for example, we can use -P in grep to make use of Perl regular expressions to surround it.

$ printf "A-well-a don't you know about the bird?\nWell, everybody knows that the bird is a word" | grep -noP '\bbird\b'                                               
1:bird
2:bird

Simple grep

$ grep -rIH  'word'

• -r for recursive search down from current directory
• -I to ignore binary files
• -H to output filename where match is found

Suitable for searching only.

find + grep

$ find -type f -exec grep -IH 'word' {} \;

• find does the recursive search part
• -I option is to ignore binary files
• -H to output filename where line is found

• good approach for combining with other commands within subshell, like:

  $ find -type f -exec sh -c 'grep -IHq "word" "$1" && echo "Found in $1"' sh {} \;
  

Perl

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use File::Find;
use strict;
use warnings;

sub find_word{
    return unless -f;
    if (open(my $fh, $File::Find::name)){
        while(my $line = <$fh>){
            if ($line =~ /\bword\b/){
                printf "%s\n", $File::Find::name;
                close($fh);
                return;
            }
        }
    }
}

# this assumes we're going down from current working directory
find({ wanted => \&find_word, no_chdir => 1 },".")

poor-mans recursive grep in recursive bash script

This is the "bash way". Not ideal, probably no good reason to use this when you have grep or perl installed.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
shopt -s globstar
#set -x
grep_line(){
    # note that this is simple pattern matching 
    # If we wanted to search for whole words, we could use
    # word|word\ |\ word|\ word\ )
    # although when we consider punctuation characters as well - it gets more
    # complex
    case "$1" in
        *word*) printf "%s\n" "$2";;
    esac
}
readlines(){
    #  line count variable can be used to output on which line match occured

    #line_count=1
    while IFS= read -r line;
    do
        grep_line "$line" "$filename"
        #line_count=$(($line_count+1))
    done < "$1"
}

is_text_file(){
    # alternatively, mimetype command could be used
    # with *\ text\/* as pattern in case statement
    case "$(file -b --mime-type "$1")" in
        text\/*) return 0;;
        *) return 1;;
    esac
}

main(){
    for filename in ./**/*
    do
        if [ -f "$filename" ] && is_text_file "$filename"
        then
            readlines "$filename"
        fi
    done
}
main "$@"

Solution 4

Question is quite old... anyway... currently (2016) there is a gnome app called tracker (you can find it in ubuntu repositories) that can be installed to search for text inside files (tried odt-ods-odp-pdf). The package comes with 4 other packages to be installed (tracker-extract, tracker-gui, tracker-miner-fs, tracker-utils) Namastè :)

Solution 5

You can specify wildcards in case if you want to search in specific files.

For example: If you want to to find what are all *.conf files those have word SSLCertificateFile in them, you can run this on root:

sudo grep -rIH  'SSLCertificateFile' --include \*.conf

View more solutions

Comments

[Ian Mackinnon]

The asterisk does not match hidden files. To search all files you can run grep -r word ..

[jcollum]

do you have to restart the OS to get this to work? or maybe it doesn't work in 12?

[jcollum]

which gnome-search-tool = /usr/bin/gnome-search-tool... but when I open the search option in gnome (Go, Search for files...) there's no option for "Select More Options"

[Bernard Decock]

You can launch gnome-search-tool via the dash "Search for files", so you don't need the terminal.

[hingev]

as weird as it may sound, but launching applications from gnome or unity launch different apps, like gnome-settings for example

[Hatoru Hansou]

Tracker is good software but it requires the index to already contain info about the file you are interested to hit it with a search. It uses less resources than Recoll, I'm not sure about the index size. But if you are in need to search a file with a specific text and want to do it with a gui, gnome-search-tool solves the problem without an index. It was a default app in previous Ubuntu versions, I don't know why they removed it without a replacement.

[noobninja]

if grep is called from a shell script, then the search keyword may not print highlighted, but the --color=auto flag can solve that.

[Yrogirg]

unfortunately, gnome-search-tool was removed from ubuntu

[Mehdi]

and from the results, how can i get the file path?

[fdetsch]

As suggested here, use mate-search-tool instead which seems to offer identical functionality. Install via sudo apt install mate-utils.