Search all documents ending in .log for a string of text?

[Dáire Fagan]

I'm trying to search all .log files in ~/.irssi/irclogs/ and it's sub directories for the string 'irssi' and I had though the command I'd used for something similar before was:


$HOME -name 'documentname*' -exec grep "string" /dev/null '{}' +

Evidently this is not the case as bash outputs:


bash: /home/dusf: is a directory

How should I edit the command, and is it possible to output every line found containing the string to file?

[ad_267]

Close, it should be:

find ~/.irssi/irclogs -name "*.log" -exec grep -H "irssi" {} \;

$HOME just means your home directory, you would usually start a command with the name of an executable to run.

The "-H" means grep will print out the file name if it finds a match. I usually want this option enabled when using grep with find but you might not. You can use the "-i" option for grep if you want the grep to be case insensitive too.

If you want to output the result of a command to a file then just add " > filename.txt" at the end.

[Dáire Fagan]

Close, it should be:

find ~/.irssi/irclogs -name "*.log" -exec grep -H "irssi" {} \;$HOME just means your home directory, you would usually start a command with the name of an executable to run.

The "-H" means grep will print out the file name if it finds a match. I usually want this option enabled when using grep with find but you might not. You can use the "-i" option for grep if you want the grep to be case insensitive too.

If you want to output the result of a command to a file then just add " > filename.txt" at the end.

Works great, thanks! :)

Could we an an argument to search for lines with the string "irssi", but don't include those that also contain the string "quit"?

[ad_267]

Yeah one way would be to pipe the output of that command into another grep that removes any lines containing quit.

So the full command with the output going to a file would be:


find ~/.irssi/irclogs -name "*.log" -exec grep -H "irssi" {} \; | grep -v "quit" > filename.txt

The "|" sends the output from the first find command into the second grep and the "-v" option means invert, so it outputs any lines that don't contain quit.

Another way might be to use a regular expression with just the one grep that matched lines containing irssi but not quit.

[Dáire Fagan]

Yeah one way would be to pipe the output of that command into another grep that removes any lines containing quit.

So the full command with the output going to a file would be:


find ~/.irssi/irclogs -name "*.log" -exec grep -H "irssi" {} \; | grep -v "quit" > filename.txtThe "|" sends the output from the first find command into the second grep and the "-v" option means invert, so it outputs any lines that don't contain quit.

Another way might be to use a regular expression with just the one grep that matched lines containing irssi but not quit.

Thanks :)

Grep seems like a very cool and powerful tool which I look forward to learning to use.