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 Linux Find File containing Text – How to Use GREP to Find Strings of Text in Files, Folders & Sub-directories! I would like to list the files recursively and uniquely that contain the given word. Here are two methods you can use to search for file contents in Linux. To find out which C source code files contain references to the sl.h header file, use this command: grep -l "sl.h" *.c. And of course, we can look for files that don’t contain the search term. 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. The hidden file is still listed, but the “.” and “..” entries are suppressed. So I just need to list the filenames that contain the given search word. Your default bash shell considers many of these special characters (also known as meta-characters) as commands. Grep is a Linux / Unix command-line tool used to search for a string of characters in a specified file. Many modern file managers support file searching right in the file list. Linux, regardless of the distro you use, comes with a number of GUI tools which allow searching for files. 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. Here is a sample list of file names: The problem and solution. My OS is: SunOS test 5.10 Generic_142900-13 sun4u sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise (8 Replies) How do I find all files that match pattern A but don’t match pattern B?. Sample file list. In this quick tip I am going to show you to delete or copy files with names that contain strange characters on Linux. However, most of them do not allow you to search inside a file's contents. Listing Directories Recursively. The file names are listed, not the matching lines. But without unzipping them before that, more like using something like gzcat. How to search a directory tree for all files containing specific text string on Linux using the command line. 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. How do I find all files that contain string A but do NOT contain string B on linux using bash?. 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. 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. The text search pattern is called a regular expression. Hi, I have a list of zipped files. When it finds a match, it prints the line with the result. The original question asked about “strings” but the tools we’ll be using support regular expressions so we will essentially be answering:. To see the names of the files that contain the search term, use the -l (files with match) option. 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. This tutorial will help you to search all files matching a string recursively. I want to grep for a string in all files and get a list of file names that contain the string. The grep command is handy when searching through large log files. If you’d just like a possible solution: This tutorial uses “grep” command to search string in files. This Linux find command using the “not” operator creates a list of all files not ending with the .html file extension (filename pattern). 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.