Linux search – Java Tutorials for dummies

March 9th, 2023

Linux search

Search file by name

find . -iname “*abc.txt”

Search 'text' in any file

grep -rnw “/path/to/somewhere/” -e “pattern”

-r or -R is recursive,
-n is line number, and
-w stands for match the whole word.
-l (lower-case L) can be added to just give the file name of matching files.
-e is the pattern used during the search

Along with these, --exclude, --include, --exclude-dir flags could be used for efficient searching:

This will only search through those files which have .c or .h extensions:
```
grep --include=\*.{c,h} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
```
This will exclude searching all the files ending with .o extension:
```
grep --exclude=\*.o -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
```
For directories it’s possible to exclude one or more directories using the --exclude-dir parameter. For example, this will exclude the dirs dir1/, dir2/ and all of them matching *.dst/:

grep –exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,*.dst} -rnw ‘/path/to/search/’ -e “pattern”

Reference:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16956810/how-to-find-all-files-containing-specific-text-string-on-linux

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