SBDavid
Jun 15th, 2009
Jun 15th, 2009
Find text in a large number of files
Find text in a large number of files
If you need to find a string in a file, you would typically use:
grep -H “string” file-name.ext
However, grep doesn’t handle a large number of files well. If you specify grep “string” * or even grep “string” `find ./`you may find yourself facing this error:
bash: /bin/grep: Argument list too long
Simple bash script to do the searching.
In this sample, We will be looking for a string “welcome” in a directory named “./Document/”:
for i in `find ./Document/`; do grep -H “welcome” $i; done
This uses the find command to do the searching. It actually returns a list of filenames, which we can then grep one-by-one. The -H option tells grep to let us know the filename it found the string in so we can go right into that file to find the location of it.
