#Bash search for text in files how to#

You may want to search for specific lines in a log file in order to troubleshoot servers issues. When working on a Linux system, finding text in files is a very common task done by system administrators every day. e.g to search 'text' in current directory and all the files inside. This tutorial focuses on finding text in files using the grep command and regular expressions.

#Bash search for text in files how to#

The output file list includes plain text, scripts, formatted text, and source code files. bash how to search for a string in all files in given directory using grep command duplicate Ask Question Asked 4 years, 6 months ago. The grep command needs to be modified accordingly, putting the other character used as a separator in place of вЂњ:вЂќ. sed -i s/foo/linux/ file.txt 123 Foo linux foo linux /bin/bash Ubuntu foobar 456 With the global replacement flag sed replaces all occurrences of the search pattern. In the rare case in which some of the files contain the character вЂњ:вЂќ as part of their name, we can use the -F argument of the file command to use some character other than the вЂњ:вЂќ character as the separator. If the g flag is omitted, only the first instance of the search string in each line is replaced. In other words, the expression means вЂњsearch for a : in the file command output followed by any number of characters вЂњ.*вЂќ and then the sub-string вЂќ textвЂќ. The expression вЂњ.*вЂќ ensures that the sub-string вЂќ textвЂќ is only searched in the file type description, not in the filename. The subsequent grep command filters all files with вЂњASCII textвЂќ or вЂњUTF-8 Unicode textвЂќ as part of the file type description. The file * command prints a list of filenames followed by the file type description of all files in the current directory. If you want to get number of occurrences use wc -l as pipe. We can quickly list all text files in the current directory using a simple command: file * | grep '.* text' e.g to search 'text' in current directory and all the files inside. If our interest is only in files in the current directory, then the command is effortless.