Often you may want to use the grep command in Bash to list all files in a particular directory that contain a specific string within the file contents.
You can use the following syntax to do so:
grep -Rnw 'c:/users/bobbi/data1' -e 'Guards'
This particular example will return all files in the directory c:/users/bobbi/data1 that contain the string ‘Guards’ somewhere in the file contents.
Here is what the various commands do:
- R: Search “recursively”, i.e. search the entire directory
- n: Return the line “number”
- w: Match the whole “word” specified
- e: Specifies the pattern to search for
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: Use grep to List All Files Containing Specific String
Suppose that we have a directory with the following path:
- c:/users/bobbi/data1
We can use the ls command to list all files in this directory:
We can see that the directory contains the following three files:
- team_info1.txt
- team_info2.txt
- team_info3.txt
We can use the cat command to view the contents of each file:
Suppose that we would like to return only the files that contain the string “Guards” somewhere in the file contents.
We can use the following syntax to do so:
grep -Rnw 'c:/users/bobbi/data1' -e 'Guards'
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
This returns the files named team_info1.txt and team_info2.txt, which both contain the string “Guards” in the file contents.
Since we used the n command, the output also displays the line numbers where the string occurs in each file.
From the output we can see that the string “Guards” appears in line 1 of each file.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Bash:
How to Use grep to Get Line Number of Match
Bash: How to Filter for Lines in File that Start with Specific String
Bash: How to Filter for Rows where Column is Not Empty
