grep is a powerful tool for searching for a pattern in files. You can search in a single file, all directory files, or recursively through all files in a directory.
A use case to search through all files in a directory is finding information in application log files. You may want to retrieve more context information about a request and that could involve multiple files. This tutorial shows you how to search non-recursively through all files in a directory.
Ubuntu/Debian Series Overview
- Fix “sudo command not found”
- Install a Specific Version with apt-get on Ubuntu/Debian
- Fix Ubuntu/Debian apt-get “KEYEXPIRED: The following signatures were invalid”
- How to Test a Cron Job
- How to Unzip Into a Folder
- How to Show Your Elasticsearch Version on Ubuntu/Debian
- Use “which” in Linux to find the Location of an Exetable
- Sort “ls” by Last Changed Date
- How to Shutdown a Machine
- Show Hidden Files and Folders with `ls`
- Case Insensitive Search
- Search Recursive in Subdirectories
- Search all Files in a Directory (Non-Recursively)
- Search in Multiple Log Files
Search Non-Recursively all Files in a Directory with grep
You may provide a file or directory path to grep and it starts its search. A thing to keep in mind is that grep expects a file path by default. When passing a directory path to grep it will tell you that the path is a directory and you need to be more specific on what to search for:
$ grep "hostname" storage/logs
grep: data/logs: Is a directory
Grepping all Files in a Directory
Use glob patterns in the directory path to tell grep to search all files in a given directory. A glob pattern representing all files in a directory is the *.
Here’s a code snippet showing you how to search for a pattern in the current directory:
# search through all files in the current directory
grep "pattern" *
You may also search in a nested directory and append the * to the path provided to grep:
# search through all log files
grep "pattern" storage/logs/*
That’s it!
Mentioned Resources
- Future Studio tutorial on searching recursively through all files in a directory