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 1 year 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 1 year ago
Use
findinstead.caseyweederman@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Seconded, but I always have to look up the syntax. --type=file --name=“string”?
sighofannoyance@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Thank you! 🤩