I would like to list the files recursively and uniquely that contain the given word. The ‘-n’ flag specifies that results should include the line number where the target text found. To find all files containing specific text on Linux systems with the ‘grep’ command, use the ‘-rnw ‘ flag. use man grep to get all the options The grep command searches the given input FILEs for lines containing … find command: Recursively Search All Files For A String. $ grep -v As a little example, let’s say that you have three files but two of them contain the word “log”. Where the -R option tells grep to read all files under each directory, recursively, following symbolic links only if they are on the command line and option -w instructs it to select only those lines containing matches that form whole words, and -e is used to specify the string (pattern) to be searched. grep -ri "word" . To exclude files containing a specific string, use “grep” with the “-v” option. Example: I want to find folders containing the words APE, Banana and Tree. 1. * -i ignore text case * -l show file names instead of file contents portions. The ‘-r’ flag indicates a recursive search. When I was looking up how to do this : find / -type f -exec grep -H 'text-to-find-here' {} \; find command is recommend because of speed and ability to deal with filenames that contain … 0. I completed the installation part, so I don't need the files that contains words "install" in their filenames. Grep allows you to find and print the results for whole words only. However, the most famous GNU search program, grep, will look inside files with the correct flags. You can use grep to list the files containing word in the given directory: grep -Ril word directory Here: * -R recursively search files in sub-directories. So I just need to list the filenames that contain the given search word. To display print only the filenames with GNU grep, enter: grep -r -l "foo" . Using grep to Find a Specific Word in a File Unix & Linux Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Linux, FreeBSD and other Un*x-like operating systems. Count the number of files and folders containing a certain string. Just to clarify, I wanted a text within the file, not in the file name. 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. Note that the folder name needs to have all three words, but the order of the words does not matter. $ cd Linux_guides/ $ ls apache_config.pdf dhcp_config.pdf ldap_config.pdf php_install.pdf apache_install.pdf ftp_config.pdf mysql_install.pdf. Unfortunately find command cannot look inside a text file for a string. Find a Word in Directory. To search for the word phoenix in all files in the current directory, append –w to the grep command. Here we will show you how you can find specific word(s) in a file on Linux. (note: -L shows file names that do not contain the word). I'm trying to find a way to scan my entire Linux system for all the files containing a specific string of text. It only takes a minute to sign up. You need to use the grep command . grep -w phoenix * This option only prints the lines with whole-word matches and the names of the files it found them in: In order to exclude those files, you would have to perform an invert match with the “-v” option. By default, most search tools look at file names, not file contents. Prior to Ubuntu 12.4 I used to start in the dash an application, I think it was called "Search for file...", whose icon was a magnifying glass.I can't find that simple application any more. You can also specify directory name: grep -r -l "foo" /path/to/dir/*.c. find folder -name '*APE*Banana*Tree*' I have a huge folder with a lot of subfolders where I would like to search for a folder that contains three words. ... Find files containing a set of words. I want to find a text file in my hard disk which contains a specific word.