You probably already know how to use the grep command to search for a text string in a file on Linux. But what if you want to retrieve a list of files that contain the text string? This is a task best suited for grep or the find command. We’ll show you how to do it in this guide.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to use
grepandfindcommands to find all files containing specific text
| Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
|---|---|
| System | Any Linux distro |
| Software | N/A |
| Other | Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. |
| Conventions |
# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
Search for specific text with grep command
Without a doubt, grep is the best command to search a file (or files) for a specific text. By default, it returns all the lines of a file that contain a certain string. This behavior can be changed with the -l option, which instructs grep to only return the file names that contain the specified text.
Now let’s see this in action. Use the following syntax in terminal, and specify all the files you want to search by appending their path and name to the end of the command.
$ grep -l example document1.txt document2.txt
The output from grep shows us that our search string “example” only exists in the document1.txt file. Also, don’t forget that wildcards are permitted and can help make grep more efficient:
$ grep -l example *.txt
But let’s be realistic. If you’re only searching a couple of files, you probably wouldn’t have wound up reading this guide. Most likely, you have a directory (or multiple directories) full of files that you need to search. That’s no problem for grep as long as you include the -r (recursive) option in the command.
$ grep -lr example /path/to/directory1/*.txt /path/to/directory2
Or, to search the current directory and all subdirectories, omit the path at the end of the command.
$ grep -lr example
Consider also using the -i option, which makes your search string case insensitive. To learn about the rest of the grep command’s functions in detail, check out our introduction to grep guide. The man page also contains helpful information:
$ grep man
Search for specific text with find command
If you would prefer to use the find command, you can use the following command syntax:
$ find /path/to/search -type f -exec grep -l "your-search-string" {} \;
Once again, add -i to the grep portion of the command to ignore case. The find and grep methods both work well. Use whichever one you prefer.
Conclusion
In this guide, we saw how to find all files containing specific text in Linux. We learned two command line methods to accomplish the task, but even more exist.
