OK, so simple enough.. I want to recursively search a directory for files with a specific extension - and then perform an action on those files.
# pwdENTER
/dir
# ls -R | grep .txt | xargs -I {} open {} ENTER
The file /dir/reallyinsubfolder.txt does not exist. ⬅ fails (bad)
Not output, but succeeds.. /dir/fileinthisfolder.txt ⬅ opens silently (good)
This does find ALL the files I am interested in… but only OPEN's those which happen to be "1-level" deep. In this case, the attempt to open /dir/reallyinsubfolder.txt fails, as reallyinsubfolder.txt is actually /dir/sub/reallyinsubfolder.txt.
I understand that grep is simply returning the matched filename… which then chokes (in this case), the open command, as it fails to reach down to the correct sub-directory to execute the file..
How do I get grep to return the full path of a match?
How about using the find command -
find /path/to/dir -type f -iname "*.txt" -exec action to perform {} \;
find . -name *.txt -exec open {};
(Decorate with backslashes of your needing)
I believe you're asking the wrong question; parsing ls(1) output in this fashion is far more trouble than it is worth.
What would work far more reliably:
find /dir -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 open
or
find /dir -name '*.txt' -exec open {} \;
find(1) does not mangle names nearly as much as ls(1) and makes executing programs on matched files far more reliable.
Related
I need to delete all files with a pattern name: 2020*.js
Inside a specific directory: server/db/migrations/
And then show what it have been deleted: `| xargs``
I'm trying this:
find . -name 'server/db/migrations/2020*.js' #-delete | xargs
But nothing is deleted, and shows nothing.
What I'm doing wrong?
The immediate problem is that -name only looks at the last component of the file name (so 2020xxx.js) and cannot match anything with a slash in it. You can use the -path predicate but the correct solution is to simply delete these files directly:
rm -v server/db/migrations/2020*.js
The find command is useful when you need to traverse subdirectories.
Also, piping the output from find to xargs does not do anything useful; if find prints the names by itself, xargs does not add any value, and if it doesn't, well, xargs can't do anything with an empty input.
If indeed you want to traverse subdirectories, try
find server/db/migrations/ -type f -name '2020*.js' -print -delete
If your shell supports ** you could equally use
rm -v server/db/migrations/**/2020*.js
which however has a robustness problem if there can be very many matching files (you get "command line too long"). In that scenario, probably fall back to find after all.
You're looking for something like this:
find server/db/migrations -type f -name '2020*.js' -delete -print
You have try this:
find . -name 'server/db/migrations/2020*.js' | xargs rm
I am trying to do a simple search through files.
Find all files that match a name pattern
Grep through results of step 1 and find only files whose contents have a specific string
I tried,
find . -name rio.yml -exec grep "my pattern" \;
Whats best practice for something like this.
If you just want the paths that contain the match, do:
find . -name rio.yml -type f -exec grep -q "my pattern" {} \; -print
(Given that you're already filtering on the name, the -type f may be redundant, but I find it helpful when grepping.) You can use grep -l, but it's often convenient to build a pipeline to xargs with -print0, so this is a good pattern.
To get the filename which contains some string, you need to use grep -l
find . -name rio.yml -exec grep -l "my pattern" {} \;
To get full path of the files; you can use $(pwd) in place of search directory.
I want to find all the occurrences of "getId" inside a directory which has subdirectories as follows:
*/*/*/*/*/*/myfile.gz
i tried thisfind -name *myfile.gz -print0 | xargs -0 zgrep -i "getId" but it didn't work. Can anyone tell me the best and simplest approach to get this?
find ./ -name '*gz' -exec zgrep -aiH 'getSorById' {} \;
find allows you to execute a command on the file using "-exe" and it replaces "{}" with the file name, you terminate the command with "\;"
I added "-H" to zgrep so it also prints out the file path when it has a match, as its helpful. "-a" treats binary files as text (since you might get tar-ed gzipped files)
Lastly, its best to quote your strings in case bash starts globbing them.
https://linux.die.net/man/1/grep
https://linux.die.net/man/1/find
Use the following find approach:
find . -name *myfile.gz -exec zgrep -ai 'getSORByID' {} \;
This will print all possible lines containing getSORByID substring
I have to execute command in bash for all files in a folder with the extension ".prot'
The command is called "bezogener_Spannungsgradient" and it's called like that:
bezogener_Spannungsgradient filename.prot
Thanks!
find . -maxdepth 1 -name \*.prot -exec bezogener_Spannungsgradient {} \;
-maxdepth <depth> keeps find from recursing into subdirectories beyond the given depth.
-name <pattern> limits find to files matching the pattern. The escape is necessary to keep bash from expanding the find option into a list of matching files.
-exec <cmd> {} \; executes <cmd> on each found file (replacing {} with the filename). If the command is capable of processing a list of files, use + instead of \;.
I generally recommend becoming familiar with the lots of other options of find; it's one of the most underestimated tools out there. ;-)
You could do this:
for f in *.prot; do
bezogener_Spannungsgradient "$f"
done
Im wondering if someone can help me out.
Im currently using the following to find all PHP files in a certain directory
find /home/mywebsite -type f -name "*.php"
How would i extend that to search through those PHP files and get all files with the string base64_decode?
Any help would be great.
Cheers,
find /home/mywebsite -type f -name '*.php' -exec grep -l base64_decode {} +
The -exec option to find executes a command on the files found. {} is replaced by the filename, and the + means that it should keep repeating this for all the filenames. grep looks for a string in the file, and the -l option tells it to print just the filename when there's a match, not all the matching lines.
If you're getting an error from find, you may have an old version that doesn't support the + feature of -exec. Use this command instead:
find /home/mywebsite -type f -name '*.php' | xargs grep -l base64_decode
xargs reads its standard input and turns them into arguments for the command line in its arguments.