![]() ![]() If not: To list all regular files in a given directory “myfiles” matching the pattern “. Use find to process files one-by-one and to add recursionĪ nice side-effect using find would be that we can now search entire directory trees recursively for the files we are interested in. Well - we could simply use the command “find” to search for the files we are interested in, and then analyze the content of every single file one-by-one. 23 If you have GNU grep (always on Linux and Cygwin, occasionally elsewhere), you can count the output lines from grep -o: grep -o needle wc -l. In this scenario (a huge directory) the pattern “*.tex *.txt” could lead to a really huge list of filenames and therefore this then leads to an Argument list too long error if you are submitting the command line. grep -c is useful for finding how many times a string occurs in a file, but it only counts each occurence once per line. If we assume a directory with hundreds of thousands or even millions of files, then we could have a problem with the last approach: This works as intended and this could be the final solution for the question at the beginning.ĭid you read in the question that we have a “huge directory” of files? Avoid ‘Argument list too long” errors … Yes - this looks a bit awkward ( sorry for that lame pun□ ), but it’s really easy to understand, once you know a few basics only: If you, for example, want to search for the phrase “HELLO” in a file called document.txt, you could do the following: The tool that first comes into mind if talking about searching for a phrase within a file, is the command grep. Let’s start with the part that searches the files for a search phraseĭo the search with grep … the obvious one for example: If I have a string 'string12345' and it appears 3 times in several lines inside filename1.txt and appear 3 times in several lines inside filename2.txt as well when I use grep string12345. The name of every *.txt or *.tex file, that contains a search-phrase within the first N lines Currently Im getting multiple results with the same filename if a certain string appear several times inside a file.So take this as an inspiration for similar tasks. First, to demonstrate the power of the Linux command-line and second, to give you an understanding of how to tackle these types of problems.Īnd as always - there are way more ways to get this problem solved. (For the sake of readability I slightly edited the wording. How can I - with the help of the shell and awk - get a list of all *.tex and *.txt files within this directory, that contain a certain string within the first N lines?” “Assuming I have a huge directory of files of different types. Keep it simple! List of files with a search string within the first 15 linesĪs part of the “Ask Robert” campaign, I recently got the following question: ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |