If I want to search for a directory or symlinks, I can do the following in bash:
find . \( -type d -o -type l \) -maxdepth 1
The same command doesn't work in ZSH:
find: missing argument to `-type'
): No such file or directory
-maxdepth: No such file or directory
1: No such file or directory
So I guess some more escaping or similar is needed. Is there a way to specify this command so that it works in both - ZSH and bash?
Here the output of setopt in ZSH:
alwaystoend
autocd
autopushd
nobeep
nocheckjobs
completeinword
extendedhistory
noflowcontrol
histexpiredupsfirst
histfindnodups
histignorealldups
histignoredups
histignorespace
histsavenodups
histverify
nohup
incappendhistory
interactive
interactivecomments
longlistjobs
monitor
promptsubst
pushdignoredups
pushdminus
sharehistory
shinstdin
zle
My ZSH version is: zsh 5.8 (x86_64-ubuntu-linux-gnu)
Of course, I'm using Oh My Zsh.
The OP confirmed that a global alias for l was defined, which altered the set of arguments seen by find, leading to the error.
I have a zsh function, fvi (find vi), which recursively greps a directory searching for files with a pattern, collects them and opens them in vim (on the Mac):
function fvi { grep -rl $1 . | xargs sh -c '/Applications/MacVim.app/Contents/MacOS/Vim -g -- "$#" <$0' /dev/tty }
This looks bad but works fine (on the Mac). But I'd like to set the search pattern for vi to $1 with:
function fvi { grep -rl $1 . | xargs zsh -c '/Applications/MacVim.app/Contents/MacOS/Vim -c +/"$1" -g -- "$#" <$0' /dev/tty }
This of course does not work since xargs/zsh sees the $1 and translates it into a file name. I can manually say -c +/xyz and it will set the pattern to xyz. So I know the vim command syntax is working. I just can't get the shell command argument $1 to be substituted into the xargs string.
Any ideas?
I might just use find:
fvi () {
v=/Applications/MacVim.app/Contents/MacOS/Vim
find . -exec grep -e $1 -- {} \; -exec $v -g +/$1 -- {} \;
}
The fact that you are opening each file in vim for interactive editing suggests there are not so many possible matches (or candidates) that running grep multiple times is really an issue. (At worst, you are just replacing each extra shell process started by xargs with an instance of grep.)
This also precludes any possible issue regarding file names that contain a newline.
I wrote a script in R that has several arguments. I want to iterate over 20 directories and execute my script on each while passing in a substring from the file path as my -n argument using sed. I ran the following:
find . -name 'xray_data' -exec sh -c 'Rscript /Users/Caitlin/Desktop/DeMMO_Pubs/DeMMO_NativeRock/DeMMO_NativeRock/R/scipts/dataStitchR.R -f {} -b "{}/SEM_images" -c "{}/../coordinates.txt" -z ".tif" -m ".tif" -a "Unknown|SEM|Os" -d "overview" -y "overview" --overview "overview.*tif" -p FALSE -n "`sed -e 's/.*DeMMO.*[/]\(.*\)_.*[/]xray_data/\1/' "{}"`"' sh {} \;
which results in this error:
ubs/DeMMO_NativeRock/DeMMO_NativeRock/R/scipts/dataStitchR.R -f {} -b "{}/SEM_images" -c "{}/../coordinates.txt" -z ".tif" -m ".tif" -a "Unknown|SEM|Os" -d "overview" -y "overview" --overview "overview.*tif" -p FALSE -n "`sed -e 's/.*DeMMO.*[/]\(.*\)_.*[/]xray_data/\1/' "{}"`"' sh {} \;
sh: command substitution: line 0: syntax error near unexpected token `('
sh: command substitution: line 0: `sed -e s/.*DeMMO.*[/](.*)_.*[/]xray_data/1/ "./DeMMO1/D1T3rep_Dec2019_Ellison/xray_data"'
When I try to use sed with my pattern on an example file path, it works:
echo "./DeMMO1/D1T1exp_Dec2019_Poorman/xray_data" | sed -e 's/.*DeMMO.*[/]\(.*\)_.*[/]xray_data/\1/'
which produces the correct substring:
D1T1exp_Dec2019
I think there's an issue with trying to use single quotes inside the interpreted string but I don't know how to deal with this. I have tried replacing the single quotes around the sed pattern with double quotes as well as removing the single quotes, both result in this error:
sed: RE error: illegal byte sequence
How should I extract the substring from the file path dynamically in this case?
To loop through the output of find.
while IFS= read -ru "$fd" -d '' files; do
echo "$files" ##: do whatever you want to do with the files here.
done {fd}< <(find . -type f -name 'xray_data' -print0)
No embedded commands in quotes.
It uses a random fd just in case something inside the loop is eating/slurping stdin
Also -print0 delimits the files with null bytes, so it should be safe enough to handle spaces tabs and newlines on the path and file names.
A good start is always put an echo in front of every commands you want to do with the files, so you have an idea what's going to be executed/happen just in case...
This is the solution that ultimately worked for me due to issues with quotes in sed:
for dir in `find . -name 'xray_data'`;
do sampleID="`basename $(dirname $dir) | cut -f1 -d'_'`";
Rscript /Users/Caitlin/Desktop/DeMMO_Pubs/DeMMO_NativeRock/DeMMO_NativeRock/R/scipts/dataStitchR.R -f "$dir" -b "$dir/SEM_images" -c "$dir/../coordinates.txt" -z ".tif" -m ".tif" -a "Unknown|SEM|Os" -d "overview" -y "overview" --overview "overview.*tif" -p FALSE -n "$sampleID";
done
I use the following command to find a string recursively within a directory structure.
find . -exec grep -l samplestring {} \;
But when I run the command within a large directory structure, there will be a long list of
grep: ./xxxx/xxxxx_yy/eee: Is a directory
grep: ./xxxx/xxxxx_yy/eee/local: Is a directory
grep: ./xxxx/xxxxx_yy/eee/lib: Is a directory
I want to omit those above results. And just get the file name with the string displayed. can someone help?
grep -s or grep --no-messages
It is worth reading the portability notes in the GNU grep documentation if you are hoping to use this code multiple places, though:
-s
--no-messages
Suppress error messages about nonexistent or unreadable files. Portability note: unlike GNU grep, 7th Edition Unix grep did not conform to POSIX, because it lacked -q and its -s option behaved like GNU grep’s -q option.1 USG-style grep also lacked -q but its -s option behaved like GNU grep’s. Portable shell scripts should avoid both -q and -s and should redirect standard and error output to /dev/null instead. (-s is specified by POSIX.)
Whenever you are saying find ., the utility is going to return all the elements within your current directory structure: files, directories, links...
If you just want to find files, just say so!
find . -type f -exec grep -l samplestring {} \;
# ^^^^^^^
However, you may want to find all files containing a string saying:
grep -lR "samplestring"
Exclude directory warnings in grep with the --exclude-dir option:
grep --exclude-dir=* 'search-term' *
Just look at the grep --help page:
--exclude-dir=PATTERN directories that match PATTERN will be skipped.
I'm looking for the string foo= in text files in a directory tree. It's on a common Linux machine, I have bash shell:
grep -ircl "foo=" *
In the directories are also many binary files which match "foo=". As these results are not relevant and slow down the search, I want grep to skip searching these files (mostly JPEG and PNG images). How would I do that?
I know there are the --exclude=PATTERN and --include=PATTERN options, but what is the pattern format? The man page of grep says:
--include=PATTERN Recurse in directories only searching file matching PATTERN.
--exclude=PATTERN Recurse in directories skip file matching PATTERN.
Searching on grep include, grep include exclude, grep exclude and variants did not find anything relevant
If there's a better way of grepping only in certain files, I'm all for it; moving the offending files is not an option. I can't search only certain directories (the directory structure is a big mess, with everything everywhere). Also, I can't install anything, so I have to do with common tools (like grep or the suggested find).
Use the shell globbing syntax:
grep pattern -r --include=\*.cpp --include=\*.h rootdir
The syntax for --exclude is identical.
Note that the star is escaped with a backslash to prevent it from being expanded by the shell (quoting it, such as --include="*.cpp", would work just as well). Otherwise, if you had any files in the current working directory that matched the pattern, the command line would expand to something like grep pattern -r --include=foo.cpp --include=bar.cpp rootdir, which would only search files named foo.cpp and bar.cpp, which is quite likely not what you wanted.
Update 2021-03-04
I've edited the original answer to remove the use of brace expansion, which is a feature provided by several shells such as Bash and zsh to simplify patterns like this; but note that brace expansion is not POSIX shell-compliant.
The original example was:
grep pattern -r --include=\*.{cpp,h} rootdir
to search through all .cpp and .h files rooted in the directory rootdir.
If you just want to skip binary files, I suggest you look at the -I (upper case i) option. It ignores binary files. I regularly use the following command:
grep -rI --exclude-dir="\.svn" "pattern" *
It searches recursively, ignores binary files, and doesn't look inside Subversion hidden folders, for whatever pattern I want. I have it aliased as "grepsvn" on my box at work.
Please take a look at ack, which is designed for exactly these situations. Your example of
grep -ircl --exclude=*.{png,jpg} "foo=" *
is done with ack as
ack -icl "foo="
because ack never looks in binary files by default, and -r is on by default. And if you want only CPP and H files, then just do
ack -icl --cpp "foo="
grep 2.5.3 introduced the --exclude-dir parameter which will work the way you want.
grep -rI --exclude-dir=\.svn PATTERN .
You can also set an environment variable: GREP_OPTIONS="--exclude-dir=\.svn"
I'll second Andy's vote for ack though, it's the best.
I found this after a long time, you can add multiple includes and excludes like:
grep "z-index" . --include=*.js --exclude=*js/lib/* --exclude=*.min.js
The suggested command:
grep -Ir --exclude="*\.svn*" "pattern" *
is conceptually wrong, because --exclude works on the basename. Put in other words, it will skip only the .svn in the current directory.
In grep 2.5.1 you have to add this line to ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash profile
export GREP_OPTIONS="--exclude=\*.svn\*"
I find grepping grep's output to be very helpful sometimes:
grep -rn "foo=" . | grep -v "Binary file"
Though, that doesn't actually stop it from searching the binary files.
If you are not averse to using find, I like its -prune feature:
find [directory] \
-name "pattern_to_exclude" -prune \
-o -name "another_pattern_to_exclude" -prune \
-o -name "pattern_to_INCLUDE" -print0 \
| xargs -0 -I FILENAME grep -IR "pattern" FILENAME
On the first line, you specify the directory you want to search. . (current directory) is a valid path, for example.
On the 2nd and 3rd lines, use "*.png", "*.gif", "*.jpg", and so forth. Use as many of these -o -name "..." -prune constructs as you have patterns.
On the 4th line, you need another -o (it specifies "or" to find), the patterns you DO want, and you need either a -print or -print0 at the end of it. If you just want "everything else" that remains after pruning the *.gif, *.png, etc. images, then use
-o -print0 and you're done with the 4th line.
Finally, on the 5th line is the pipe to xargs which takes each of those resulting files and stores them in a variable FILENAME. It then passes grep the -IR flags, the "pattern", and then FILENAME is expanded by xargs to become that list of filenames found by find.
For your particular question, the statement may look something like:
find . \
-name "*.png" -prune \
-o -name "*.gif" -prune \
-o -name "*.svn" -prune \
-o -print0 | xargs -0 -I FILES grep -IR "foo=" FILES
On CentOS 6.6/Grep 2.6.3, I have to use it like this:
grep "term" -Hnir --include \*.php --exclude-dir "*excluded_dir*"
Notice the lack of equal signs "=" (otherwise --include, --exclude, include-dir and --exclude-dir are ignored)
git grep
Use git grep which is optimized for performance and aims to search through certain files.
By default it ignores binary files and it is honoring your .gitignore. If you're not working with Git structure, you can still use it by passing --no-index.
Example syntax:
git grep --no-index "some_pattern"
For more examples, see:
How to exclude certain directories/files from git grep search.
Check if all of multiple strings or regexes exist in a file
I'm a dilettante, granted, but here's how my ~/.bash_profile looks:
export GREP_OPTIONS="-orl --exclude-dir=.svn --exclude-dir=.cache --color=auto" GREP_COLOR='1;32'
Note that to exclude two directories, I had to use --exclude-dir twice.
If you search non-recursively you can use glop patterns to match the filenames.
grep "foo" *.{html,txt}
includes html and txt. It searches in the current directory only.
To search in the subdirectories:
grep "foo" */*.{html,txt}
In the subsubdirectories:
grep "foo" */*/*.{html,txt}
In the directories are also many binary files. I can't search only certain directories (the directory structure is a big mess). Is there's a better way of grepping only in certain files?
ripgrep
This is one of the quickest tools designed to recursively search your current directory. It is written in Rust, built on top of Rust's regex engine for maximum efficiency. Check the detailed analysis here.
So you can just run:
rg "some_pattern"
It respect your .gitignore and automatically skip hidden files/directories and binary files.
You can still customize include or exclude files and directories using -g/--glob. Globbing rules match .gitignore globs. Check man rg for help.
For more examples, see: How to exclude some files not matching certain extensions with grep?
On macOS, you can install via brew install ripgrep.
find and xargs are your friends. Use them to filter the file list rather than grep's --exclude
Try something like
find . -not -name '*.png' -o -type f -print | xargs grep -icl "foo="
The advantage of getting used to this, is that it is expandable to other use cases, for example to count the lines in all non-png files:
find . -not -name '*.png' -o -type f -print | xargs wc -l
To remove all non-png files:
find . -not -name '*.png' -o -type f -print | xargs rm
etc.
As pointed out in the comments, if some files may have spaces in their names, use -print0 and xargs -0 instead.
Try this one:
$ find . -name "*.txt" -type f -print | xargs file | grep "foo=" | cut -d: -f1
Founded here: http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/42573-search-files-excluding-binary-files.html
those scripts don't accomplish all the problem...Try this better:
du -ha | grep -i -o "\./.*" | grep -v "\.svn\|another_file\|another_folder" | xargs grep -i -n "$1"
this script is so better, because it uses "real" regular expressions to avoid directories from search. just separate folder or file names with "\|" on the grep -v
enjoy it!
found on my linux shell! XD
Look # this one.
grep --exclude="*\.svn*" -rn "foo=" * | grep -v Binary | grep -v tags
The --binary-files=without-match option to GNU grep gets it to skip binary files. (Equivalent to the -I switch mentioned elsewhere.)
(This might require a recent version of grep; 2.5.3 has it, at least.)
suitable for tcsh .alias file:
alias gisrc 'grep -I -r -i --exclude="*\.svn*" --include="*\."{mm,m,h,cc,c} \!* *'
Took me a while to figure out that the {mm,m,h,cc,c} portion should NOT be inside quotes.
~Keith
To ignore all binary results from grep
grep -Ri "pattern" * | awk '{if($1 != "Binary") print $0}'
The awk part will filter out all the Binary file foo matches lines
Try this:
Create a folder named "--F" under currdir ..(or link another folder there renamed to "--F" ie double-minus-F.
#> grep -i --exclude-dir="\-\-F" "pattern" *