Hi friends! 🤓 I am on a gnulinux and trying to list all files in the active directory and it’s subdirectories. I then want to pipe the output to “cat”. I want to pipe the output from cat into grep.
Please help! 😅
Submitted 11 months ago by sighofannoyance@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Hi friends! 🤓 I am on a gnulinux and trying to list all files in the active directory and it’s subdirectories. I then want to pipe the output to “cat”. I want to pipe the output from cat into grep.
Please help! 😅
Note, you almost never have to use cat. Just leaving it out would have been enough to find your file (although find is still better).
When you want to find a string in a file it’s also enough to use grep string file
instead of cat file | grep string
. You can even search through multiple files with grep string file1 file2 file*
and grep will tell you in which file the string was found.
Obligatory link to the Useless Use of Cat Awards
for a moment, I thought OP was looking for cat photos or something.
So I could use something like grep string -R * to find any occurrence of the string in any files in the folder and sub-folders.
thank you!
grep -r string .
The flag should go before the pattern.
-r
to search recursively, .
refers to the current directory.
Why use .
instead of *
? Because on it’s own, *
will (typically) not match hidden files. See the last paragraph of the ‘Origin’ section of: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_(programming). Technically your ls
command (lacking the -a
) flag would also skip hidden files, but since your comment mentions finding the string in ‘any files,’ I figured hidden files should also be covered (the find
commands listed would also find the hidden files).
I think you can just do grep print **/*
.
ty
It’s valuable to learn how to do an inline loop
ls | while read A; do cat $A | grep print; done
This will read each line of ls into variable A, then it’ll get and grep each one.
thank you
grep -r print .
I.e. Grep on print
recursively from .
(current directory)
this is great ty!
geekworking@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Use
find
instead.caseyweederman@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Seconded, but I always have to look up the syntax. --type=file --name=“string”?
sighofannoyance@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Thank you! 🤩