how to find a text string which may be present in some unknown file in entire filesystem

Question

I am stuck up with a problem I have a line 'something' in some file. In which file is this line that I have forgotten. In the entire root file system I would like to find out which file and where is this line. So how can I go for this.I have used find but when I used find then I knew the name of file in this case I do not know name of file also. It is a Ubuntu server 10.04 So what can I do to find out which file has this string.

Answer 1

I always use:

find / -xdev | xargs grep "string"

That'll give you a list of all of the matched strings along with the actual files they're in.

Answer 2

A simple bruteforce solution would be:

find / -type f -exec grep -H 'some string' {} \;

(the -H option to gnu grep causes it to return the filename).

However you'd probably benefit from spedning the time writing a smarter script which ignores stuff like binary files, executables (non-script) etc.

Answer 3

heh well there are a lot of files

maybe if you could narrow it down to some time when you last accessed that file and try

find / -xdev -type f -atime -X -exec grep -H 'string' {} \;

where X is number of days from today backwards in which you are sure you accessed the file

Answer 4

Perhaps something like ' grep -iR "text to find" * ' run from the root will do it.