But without unzipping them before that, more like using something like gzcat. However, most of them do not allow you to search inside a file's contents. The text search pattern is called a regular expression. This tutorial uses “grep” command to search string in files. How do I find all files that match pattern A but don’t match pattern B?. Example: Checking for word 'check', I normal do is a grep $ grep check * -R But as there are many occurrence of this word, I get a lot of output. Here is a sample list of file names: The problem and solution. The original question asked about “strings” but the tools we’ll be using support regular expressions so we will essentially be answering:. Linux, regardless of the distro you use, comes with a number of GUI tools which allow searching for files. Many modern file managers support file searching right in the file list. Also, if you’re not familiar with it, the -f argument in that find command means “just look for files,” and don’t return search results for directories. Grep is a Linux / Unix command-line tool used to search for a string of characters in a specified file. This tutorial will help you to search all files matching a string recursively. Hi, I have a list of zipped files. This Linux find command using the “not” operator creates a list of all files not ending with the .html file extension (filename pattern). To see the names of the files that contain the search term, use the -l (files with match) option. My OS is: SunOS test 5.10 Generic_142900-13 sun4u sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise (8 Replies) Don't worry about the cover-downloading (that's a fun project for me tomorrow) I only care about the glorious bash-fuiness about an inverse-ish find example. The file names are listed, not the matching lines. You must use the -l option to list file names whose contents mention a particular word, for instance, the word 'primary', using the following command: grep -l 'primary' *.c Last Updated: December 21st, 2019 by Hitesh J in Guides , Linux When you are working on a server that has a big and large set of files, you must have a knowledge of grep command to search files that containing a specific string. If you’d just like a possible solution: For instance, print all lines that do not contain the word par by using the following command: grep -v par /path/to/file 9 How to list only the names of matching files. In this quick tip I am going to show you to delete or copy files with names that contain strange characters on Linux. I would like to list the files recursively and uniquely that contain the given word. The grep command is handy when searching through large log files. Linux Find File containing Text – How to Use GREP to Find Strings of Text in Files, Folders & Sub-directories! The hidden file is still listed, but the “.” and “..” entries are suppressed. Your default bash shell considers many of these special characters (also known as meta-characters) as commands. So I just need to list the filenames that contain the given search word. Listing Directories Recursively. To find out which C source code files contain references to the sl.h header file, use this command: grep -l "sl.h" *.c. If you don’t want your listing cluttered up with the “.” and “..” entries, but you do want to see hidden files, use the -A (almost all) option: ls -l -A. And of course, we can look for files that don’t contain the search term. I want to grep for a string in all files and get a list of file names that contain the string. By second level, I mean I don't care if /Britney Spears/ doesn't have a cover.jpg, but I would care if /Britney Spears/In The Zone/ didn't have one. How to search a directory tree for all files containing specific text string on Linux using the command line. 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