When specifying the directory ('./test' in this example), its fine to omit the trailing slash. Of course you can press Ctrl + c anytime to stop the command.

Trying to search the '/' directory which is the root, would search the entire file system including mounted devices and network storage devices. So this is a very powerful way to find all files of a given extension. Note that all sub directories are searched recursively. The following command searches for files by their name. The following command will look for files in the test directory in the current directory.

The command is same as the following $ find. This command lists out all the files in the current directory as well as the subdirectories in the current directory. List all files in current and sub directories The basic syntax of the find command looks like this $ find location comparison-criteria search-term 1. The find command is an essential one to learn, if you want to get super productive with the command line on linux. This will look for literal strings only, it won't use or expand any kind of regular expression.įor example you could type: fgrep 'a$*b?' file.txtĪnd fgrep would look for the string “a$*b?” in the file “file.txt”.The find command is available on most linux distros by default so you do not have to install any package. This version of grep calls grep with the -F option. You could also use grep with the -r option to achieve the same affect. Follows similar syntax to grep (see above). This will search all the files in the current directory and all it's subdirectories and print the names of the files and the matching line. rgrepĪ 'recursive' version of grep (this is a different program to grep). The first command lists all RPM's installed on your system, the second finds any containing the string “ogg” and outputs them. Or you could use it like this, to search through the output of another file: rpm -qa | grep ogg This command uses regular expressions, for more information please see, the Section called Regular Expressions in Chapter 20.įor example, this command would look in the file “rpmlist.txt” for anything starting with “rpm”: grep rpm rpmlist.txt r or rgrep - search for text within files recursively. A x or -B x (where x is a number) - display “x” lines After or Before the section where the particular word is found. w - this option makes grep match the whole word

n - this option displays the line numbers v - this option is used to display lines which do not contain the string. For example: grep this_word this_file.txt

Ubuntu search file recursive