I have a directory /dir
which has several text files in it, These files may or may not contain the words 'rock' and 'stone', so basically some files might just contain the word 'rock', some may just contain the word 'stone', some may contain both, and some may contain neither.
How can I list all files in this directory that contain both 'rock' and 'stone'? These words might not be on the same line so I don't think piping through grep twice would work.
Appreciate any help, I was not able to find a stackoverflow post with this problem so I figured I'd ask.
To search files that match the given two (or more) words at any line anywhere in the file, you may want to try ugrep:
ugrep -F --files -e 'rock' --and -e 'stone' dir
This only matches files that have both rock and stone in them. Lines are output that have rock or stone, or you can use option -l to just list files. The -F option searches strings (like grep -F and fgrep), --files applies the --and file-wide, which you want instead of applying the --and per line. Note that we have more than one pattern in this case, so option -e should be used (like grep also requires this).
A shorter form with --bool:
ugrep -F --files --bool 'rock stone' dir
where --bool formulates a Boolean query with space as AND (or use AND).
If you want to search directory dir recursively in subdirectories, use option -r.
Related
To clarify a bit, while I am aware how to grab words with a single specific character, I'm unsure how to approach looking for multiple of them. For example, what grep command would be used to retrieve only the words containing both "b" and "p" (in any order), not just one or the other?
Using the above example, if you're given words like "bear," "pear," "biography," and "printable," it would only return the last two words. These are some of my previous attempts.
grep -E "\b[bp]\b" input
grep -E "\b(b|p)\b" input
grep -E "\bb.*p\b" input
you can do it with a regular expression. For instance, here the code snippet for your problem.
grep '\w*[b]\w*[p]\w*\|\w*[p]\w*[b]\w*' test.txt
Helpful links to read further:
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/grep-regular-expressions/
https://regexr.com/
I am having an issue with using Ag (The Silver Searcher)...
In the docs it says to use -Q for exact match, but I don't understand why it does not work for my purposes. If I type something like ag -Q actions or ag -Q 'actions' into my terminal, it returns all instances of actions, including things like transactions and any other strings that actions is part of.
I have tried a couple other combinations of flags from the docs, including -s and -S, among others, but still I cannot get strictly strings matching just actions to return for me.
I can't get this to work with grep either. Does anyone know how I can get what I need with ag? (or even with grep)...?
Thank you in advance!
Because ag (and grep), find files that contain something. ag -Q means to interpret the search as an exact literal string, not a fuzzy string or a regex. Okay. But a file that has the word "transactions" in it contains exactly, literally the character sequence actions. Sure, it contains more than that too, but that's not surprising.
Probably you're looking for a word-boundary search, grep '\bactions\b' or ag -w -Q actions (maybe ag -w -Q -s actions). But that is not at all the same thing as "just actions", it's a specific requirement on the things surrounding "actions" (namely that they be the beginning or end of a line, or non-letter characters). You have to tell the computer what you actually mean.
It might seems like a question that would already have been answered before so pardon me if it's the case, but I can't seems to find a clear answer or an explanation on how to find words in a file with a specified number of repeated character, (ex: words containing 3 times the character '-', such as 'long-and-complex-word').
I'm aware that it is possible to use the command
grep-oE '.{n}'
To find words with consecutive repetition of character, but I'm looking for a way to find repetition of character in no particular order.
Here are the commands that I've tried that aren't working
grep -E '*[-]*[-]*[-]*' file
grep -Ex '* \-* \-* \ -*' file
Thanks.
Trying to find the name of a file by searching for a word that's in the file.
I have tried to look at many examples online but unfortunately I couldn't find a code that outputs the names of the files with that certain word in it.
grep -r 'Facebook' *
I expected the output to be many names of the files which has the word facebook in it but instead I got output of lines with the word facebook in it which is not what I wanted.
There are many possible solutions in a Unix/Linux environment:
find /path/to/base -name Facebook
ls -R /path/to/base | grep -i "[Ff]acebook"
etc.
Or there are programmatic approaches written in a language of your choice. Add more details about what you are trying to do for a better answer.
it should be something like this
grep -l "Facebook" *
this is going to search for all the files and not sub directories in the current folder and produce the name of the file where a match was found
from man page of grep:
-L, --files-without-match
Suppress normal output; instead print the name of each input file from which no output would normally have been printed. The scanning will stop on the first match.
-l, --files-with-matches
Suppress normal output; instead print the name of each input file from which output would normally have been printed. The scanning will stop on the first match. (-l is
specified by POSIX.)
I am trying to understand and read the man page. Yet everyday I find more inconsistent syntax and I would like some clarification to whether I am misunderstanding something.
Within the man page, it specifies the syntax for grep is grep [OPTIONS] [-e PATTERN]... [-f FILE]... [FILE...]
I got a working example that recursively searches all files within a directory for a keyword.
grep -rnw . -e 'memes
Now this example works, but I find it very inconsistent with the man page. The directory (Which the man page has written as [FILE...] but specifies the use case for if file == directory in the man page) is located last. Yet in this example it is located after [OPTIONS] and before [-e PATTERN].... Why is this allowed, it does not follow the specified regex fule of using this command?
Why is this allowed, it does not follow the specified regex fule of using this command?
The lines in the SYNOPSIS section of a manpage are not to be understood as strict regular expressions, but as a brief description of the syntax of a utility's arguments.
Depending on the particular application, the parser might be more or less flexible on how it accepts its options. After all, each program can implement whatever grammar they like for their arguments. Therefore, some might allow options at the beginning, at the end, or even in-between files (typically with ways to handle ambiguity that may arisa, e.g. reading from the standard input with -, filenames starting with -...).
Now, of course, there are some ways to do it that are common. For instance, POSIX.1-2017 12.1 Utility Argument Syntax says:
This section describes the argument syntax of the standard utilities and introduces terminology used throughout POSIX.1-2017 for describing the arguments processed by the utilities.
In your particular case, your implementation of grep (probably GNU's grep) allows to pass options in-between the file list, as you have discovered.
For more information, see:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/17833/understand-synopsis-in-manpage
Are there standards for Linux command line switches and arguments?
https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Getopt-Long-Options.html
You can also leverage .
grep ‘string’ * -lR