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I am looking for a specific phrase in CentOS and I am not sure where and which file or even directory that has the file is. How can I do a complete recursive search on a phrase. Thanks

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3 Answers

up vote 9 down vote

man grep
For this example, grep -i -R "your phrase" directory
-i means case insensitive
-R means recursively

If you don't know which directory, use / - but be prepared for it to take a long time.

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as I said I have no idea about directory – user50946 Sep 24 '10 at 13:45
updated with the root directory. It will take a long time though. – James Lawrie Sep 24 '10 at 13:46
I did what you said but there are a lots of records..is there any way to save this to text file? – user50946 Sep 24 '10 at 13:49
3  
read about piping and redirects. > saves to a file, >> appends to a file, and | pipes to a process. So, in this case, grep -i -R "your phrase" directory > /path/to/your/textfile - also consider adding -l to the grep arguments if you just want a list of the files (as per @Richard Holloway – James Lawrie Sep 24 '10 at 13:50
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you can redirect the output to a file with grep -i -R "your phrase" directory > myfile.txt, or you could use less to view the result with grep -i -R "your phrase" directory | less – Avada Kedavra Sep 24 '10 at 13:52
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up vote 3 down vote

You can use this one liner to get a list of all files in this folder and sub folders, containing the phrase "The phrase I am looking for".

  find . -print0 | xargs -0 grep "The phrase I am looking for" -l
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Does this add any functionality over grep's recursive flag? – James Lawrie Sep 24 '10 at 13:52
@James: No. I use it mainly to get the extra find functionality like specifying file name extensions (with -name "*.php" for example) and so on but in this example it adds nothing. – Richard Holloway Sep 24 '10 at 13:57
I'm also a pipe abuser. Once you're used to it it's hard to stop! – pauska Sep 24 '10 at 14:20
My servers cost enough money and do so little in return, what is a few extra processes here and there? :) – Richard Holloway Sep 24 '10 at 15:41
up vote 2 down vote

I would recommend ack.

Go to the uppermost level directory that you dare searching and then type:

ack -a "Phrase"

I don't really use grep anymore because of ack.

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ack is great. You can install it on CentOS from the rpmforge repo. See rpmrepo.org/RPMforge/Using for details on how to set this up. – Richard Holloway Sep 24 '10 at 19:52

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