Search dot files in current directory - grep

What's a simple way to grep just the dot files (.*) in the current directory ($HOME)? Using
grep target .*
returns a lot of nonsense:
grep: foo is a directory.
I don't want to see the nonsense.

grep has an option -s :
-s, --no-messages
Suppress error messages about nonexistent or unreadable files.
so you can just do grep -s 'target' .*

Related

grep: Find all files containing the word `star`, but not the word `start`

I have a bunch of files: some contain the word star, some contain the word start, some contain both.
I'd like to grep for files that contain the word star, but not the word start.
How can this be accomplished using only grep?
grep has some options for inverting the matches at the line or file level. You want the latter option, with the -L switch. The following will print the names of all the files in a folder that don't contain the text start:
grep -LF start *
-F tells grep that start is a literal string and not a regex. It's optional here, but might speed things up a tiny bit.
You can use the resulting list to search for files that contain star:
grep -lF star $(grep -LF start *)
-l prints only the names of files containing a match, not any line-by-line or match-by-match details. If this is not exactly what you want, man grep is your friend.
This uses an additional shell construct to run the inverted match, but it technically doesn't call any additional programs that aren't grep.
Update
Since you mention wanting to look through all the files starting with a given root folder, change -LF to -LFr. Replace * with your root folder if you don't want to change working directories.
-r tells grep to recurse into directories, and search every file it finds along the way.
With GNU grep for -w:
$ cat file
foo star bar
oof start rab
$ grep -w star *
foo star bar
or if you just want the names of the files containing star:
$ grep -lw star *
file
and to just find files to look in:
$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec grep -w 'star' {} \;
foo star bar

How to grep a pattern in specific type of files in a directory

I have a big directory that has a lot of CSS, JS, and PHP files. Some of these files exist in sub directories. I use this command to grep for files that contains a pattern recursively
grep -r <pattern> *
some times JS files occupies most of the screen, in this way.
Is there a simple way that can just grep PHP file, without using "find"?
You'd need to specify --include:
grep -r --include '*.php' <pattern> .
The --include option takes a glob that can be used to specify the files to be searched:
--include=GLOB
Search only files whose base name matches GLOB (using wildcard
matching as described under --exclude).
grep -Hrn <pattern> *.php
This will only search in file with .php extensions
-H will also give filename
n = will also show line number in file
r = recursive
Hope this helps
You can use a second grep:
grep -rH pattern * | grep '.php:'
But the best way would be find anyway:
find -name '*.php' -exec grep pattern {} \;

grep mistaking pattern for file?

cat file.txt | grep -x "\d*"
grep: \Documents and Settings: Is a directory
I want to search file.txt for any lines that are numbers only but grep seems to be viewing \d* as a wildcard for files and not the pattern. How can I specify that it's the pattern and it should use stdin for what to grep over?
The file is full of lines of datetime stamps, some end with a letter, some don't.
20140110122200
20131208041510M
...
I'm trying to only get the lines that don't end in a letter.
EDIT: I've also tried setting the filename instead of piping it with cat. Not much different.
C:\long\path>grep -ex "\d*" -f file.txt
grep: \Dell: Is a directory
grep: \Documents and Settings: Is a directory
Why are you using cat to pass the file to grep? Why not just give grep the filename directly?
grep -x '\d*' file.txt
I think the actual problem you're seeing is that the * wildcard is being expanded. That's why grep is giving you errors that mention actual directories (beginning with 'd') on your system.

How to use grep to search only in a specific file types?

I have a lot of files and I want to find where is MYVAR.
I'm sure it's in one of .yml files but I can't find in the grep manual how to specify the filetype.
grep -rn --include=*.yml "MYVAR" your_directory
please note that grep is case sensitive by default (pass -i to tell to ignore case), and accepts Regular Expressions as well as strings.
You don't give grep a filetype, just a list of files. Your shell can expand a pattern to give grep the correct list of files, though:
$ grep MYVAR *.yml
If your .yml files aren't all in one directory, it may be easier to up the ante and use find:
$ find -name '*.yml' -exec grep MYVAR {} \+
This will find, from the current directory and recursively deeper, any files ending with .yml. It then substitutes that list of files into the pair of braces {}. The trailing \+ is just a special find delimiter to say the -exec switch has finished. The result is matching a list of files and handing them to grep.
If all your .yml files are in one directory, then cd to that directory, and then ...
grep MYWAR *.yml
If all your .yml files are in multiple directories, then cd to the top of those directories, and then ...
grep MYWAR `find . -name \*.yml`
If you don't know the top of those directories where your .yml files are located and want to search the whole system ...
grep MYWAR `find / -name \*.yml`
The last option may require root privileges to read through all directories.
The ` character above is the one that is located along with the ~ key on the keyboard.
find . -name \*.yml -exec grep -Hn MYVAR {} \;

grep in all directories

I have a directory named XYZ which has directories ABC, DEF, GHI inside it. I want to search for a pattern 'writeText' in all *.c in all directories (i.e XYZ, XYZ/ABC, XYZ/DEF and XYZ/GHI)
What grep command can I use?
Also if I want to search only in XYZ, XYZ/ABC, XYZ/GHI and not XYZ/DEF, what grep command can I use?
Thank you!
grep -R --include="*.c" --exclude-dir={DEF} writeFile /path/to/XYZ
-R means recursive, so it will go into subdirectories of the directory you're grepping through
--include="*.c" means "look for files ending in .c"
--exclude-dir={DEF} means "exclude directories named DEF. If you want to exclude multiple directories, do this: --exclude-dir={DEF,GBA,XYZ}
writeFile is the pattern you're grepping for
/path/to/XYZ is the path to the directory you want to grep through.
Note that these flags apply to GNU grep, might be different if you're using BSD/SysV/AIX grep. If you're using Linux/GNU grep utils you should be fine.
You can use the following command to answer at least the first part of your question.
find . -name *.c | xargs grep "writeText"

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