Grep command with multiple files


















Learn how to use grep for additional use cases. To avoid missing something when you search for multiple patterns, use the -i flag to ignore letter case. The output shows how the two commands differ. If you include the -i flag and ignore letter case, the result for multiple matches includes all matches. This way, you get additional results. If you also add the -w flag to this command, you can narrow down the results even further:.

The output prints the number of matches. This way, you can quickly determine if the number of warnings and errors increased. You can use grep to search multiple strings in a certain type of file only. If you want to monitor log files in one directory or if you want to search through all text files, use an asterisk and the file extension instead of a file name.

For example, to search for warnings and errors through all. To include all files, use sudo with the grep command. Enter the sudo password, and grep will search through all files.

The grep command searches only in the current directory when you use the asterisk wildcard. To include all subdirectories when searching for multiple patterns, add the -R operator to grep:. In our case, the grep command to match the word phoenix in three files sample , sample2 , and sample3 looks like this example:.

The terminal prints the name of every file that contains the matching lines, and the actual lines that include the required string of characters. You can append as many filenames as needed. The terminal prints a new line with the filename for every match it finds in the listed files. Tip: Refer to our article Xargs Commands to learn how to use xargs with grep to search for a string in the list of files.

To search all files in the current directory, use an asterisk instead of a filename at the end of a grep command. The output shows the name of the file with nix and returns the entire line. Grep allows you to find and print the results for whole words only. To search for the word phoenix in all files in the current directory, append -w to the grep command. This option only prints the lines with whole-word matches and the names of the files it found them in:.

When -w is omitted, grep displays the search pattern even if it is a substring of another word. If you would like to search for multiple strings and word patterns, check out our article on how to grep for multiple strings, patterns or words. As grep commands are case sensitive, one of the most useful operators for grep searches is -i. Instead of printing lowercase results only, the terminal displays both uppercase and lowercase results.

The output includes lines with mixed case entries. If we use the -i operator to search files in the current directory for phoenix , the output looks like this:.

To include all subdirectories in a search, add the -r operator to the grep command. This command prints the matches for all files in the current directory, subdirectories, and the exact path with the filename. In the example below, we also added the -w operator to show whole words, but the output form is the same.

If you do not know where exactly the files are located, but know their names, you can use find :. If you want to search through multiple files in multiple directories, you can add -R for a recursive search.

Though disclaimer, I do not know if this is the intended semantic or just a symptom that fits to the tools I use. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Use "grep" to match text in multiple files Ask Question.

Asked 10 years, 4 months ago. Active 6 years, 11 months ago. Viewed 64k times. This can be achieved using the -q command-line option.

In the case of grep, the command exits with '0' status when it's successful meaning, a match was found , while it exits with status '1' when no match was found. By default, the grep command displays the name of files containing the search pattern as well as matched lines. This is quite logical, as that's what expected of this tool. However, there might be cases wherein the requirement could be to get names of those files that do not contain the searched pattern.

This is also possible with grep - the -L options lets you do this. So, for example, to find all those text files in the current directory that does not contain the word "how", you can run the following command:. If you want, you can also force grep to mute any error messages it displays in the output. This can be done using the -s command line option. As clear from the example used in the previous point, the grep command doesn't do a recursive search by default.

To make sure your grep search is recursive, use the -d command-line option and pass the value 'recurse' to it. As we have already discussed, the -l command-line option of grep is used when you only want the tool to display filenames in the output. For example:. Here's how you can verify that:.

So the output of the cat command confirms the presence of a newline character between the file names. But as you might already know, the newline character can be part of a file name as well. Well, you'll be glad to know that grep provides a command-line option -Z that makes sure filenames are followed by a NULL character and not a newline.

Grep is the Linux administrator's swiss army knife when it comes to debugging errors in services. Most Linux services have log files, where they are reporting errors to. These log files can be huge and grep is a versatile and fast command to search for e. Search for connections related to a specific email address, here ' [email protected] ' in the mail. To continuously monitor a log file for connections for this email address, combine tail and grep commands like this:.

In our second GREP command tutorial, you can find even more examples of how to use this Linux command.



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