tgsraka.blogg.se - Grep exclude

#Grep exclude how to#
#Grep exclude update#
#Grep exclude manual#

#Grep exclude how to#

If you found this post interesting, I’ve also written up some examples of how to grep using Windows Powershell here. type f -exec grep -n "text_to_find" \ -print If you have filenames with spaces in them, the commands above will not work properly, another alternative is:įind. type f -print | xargs file | grep -i text | cut -d ':' -f 1 | xargs grep text_to_find If you don’t know what file type to narrow the search by, you make use of the “ file” command to restrict the search to text files only:įind. name '*.c' | xargs grep -n "text_to_find" You can narrow down the selection criteria:įind. The above command is fine if you don’t have many files to search though, but it will search all files types, including binaries, so may be very slow. If you do not have GNU grep on your Unix system, you can still grep recursively, by combining the find command with grep: But older releases of Unix do not have GNU grep and do not have any option to grep recursively. This is all very easy because Linux includes GNU grep.

To search within particular file types:.

Note line numbers are added with -n option

I always like to use grep -rn because it shows the line number also:.

You could easily replace that with “/etc” for example:

The dot simply means start the search from the current working directory.

“text_to_find” is the string to search for.

#Grep exclude manual#

Take a look at the grep manual and the sed manual for more information.If you’re using Linux, performing a recursive grep is very easy. For example, say you want to skip the tests/ directory: grep -RiIl -exclude-dir=tests 'search' | xargs sed 's/search/replace/g'Įxclude multiple directories by wrapping them into curly braces, like so: grep -RiIl -exclude-dir= 'search' | xargs sed 's/search/replace/g'īoth grep and sed support regular expressions, so you can search with grep given a specific pattern and then replace the text with sed given another one. You can add the -exclude-dir= parameter to grep if you want to skip a specific directory while searching for files.

replace), the g instructs the command to replace all occurrences.įine tuning 1: how to exclude directories while searching

s/search/replace/g - this is the substitution command.

In this case, we can exclude a directory by first using find to list the files and then (with the help of xargs ) running the results of find through grep.

#Grep exclude update#

In the current snippet I'm using it to replace text with the following parameters: Unfortunately, you may find older versions of grep that do not support the -exclude-dir option (and if you’re working on someone else’s server you may not be able to update grep). Sed is a glorious Unix utility that transforms text. So in this example the output of grep is passed to the next command sed as its argument. This is a little command-line utility that takes what receives in input and passes it as argument to another program. l - print results as a simple list of file names.R - perform a recursive search, also across symbolic links.

Here I'm invoking it with the following parameters: Grep is a utility for searching for strings through multiple text files. Let me now dissect it and take a quick look at the different tools in use. Assuming that you want to search for the string search through multiple files and replace it with replace, this is the one-liner: grep -RiIl 'search' | xargs sed -i 's/search/replace/g'

After a bit of research I've come up with a nice solution. Often times I need to search and replace a string of text across multiple files in my Linux box.