how to find a word in text files from a directory
Solution 1
- Open a terminal.
- Install
ack-grep
by typingsudo apt-get install ack-grep
- Change to the directory you want to search under, and type
ack-grep foo
. it lists out all the matches in all files under that directory.
Solution 2
If you don't want to install additional software, you can simply use grep
in the terminal. To recursively search through directories, you can use the -r
option (see man grep
for details). The syntax you are looking for is probably:
grep -r "[STRING TO SEARCH FOR]" "[DIRECTORY TO SEARCH]"
So, for instance if I want to search for the string "asdf" in all files in all subdirectories of "/tmp/testdir/" the command looks like this:
grep -r "asdf" "/tmp/testdir/"
The quotation marks are not strictly necessary, but if your string or directory path contains whitespaces, you otherwise would have to mask them using the \ character...
Solution 3
You can use recursive grep
with the -l
flag to only print the file's name instead of the matched line:
grep -Rl foo .
Or, you can use find
:
find . -type f -exec grep -l foo {} +
Or. you can use extglob
and normal grep
shopt -s extglob
grep -l foo **/*
Solution 4
Just install gnome-search-tool
using sudo apt-get install gnome-search-tool
Search in dash for 'search for files' and launch it.
See image below:
- Leave the 'name contains' section empty.
- Select your folder.
- Unfold the 'select more options' part and choose 'contains the text' and then press add.
- Type here the text you want to search for and click find at the bottom right corner.
Enjoy.
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Comments
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Mohammad Reza Rezwani over 1 year
Suppose that I have a directory with name _file and includes two sub directory like _1 and _2 and on each one I have some text files. I want to search a word like foo in one of these text files. How I can do that? I want to know which text files in the whole directory contain that word?
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Jacob Vlijm about 10 yearsthe question here shows two options to recursively search a whole directory for the occurrence of strings in textfiles: askubuntu.com/questions/460536/…
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Admin about 10 yearsYour question is not clear. Do you want to use a terminal command (obviously, but that belongs to the basics of Unix like system learning, you can google that yourself), a given software or what ?
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Mohammad Reza Rezwani about 10 years@begueradj I did not now there are any softwares for this. So I asked general;)
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Kasper Thystrup Karstensen almost 6 yearsPlease accept the answer by @soulsource as this is a minimalized solution, relative to the suggestion of installing extra software.
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Akash Agarwal almost 8 yearsI'd like to add that on Xubuntu you don't need to specify the directory if you're looking for text in present working directory.
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Nam G VU over 6 yearsAfter install running
ack-grep soemthing
results error on my Ubuntu Desktop 17.