Find Help

[dillzz]

Perhaps someone can lead me in the right direction. I am trying to do a filesystem global search within all txt files for a certain string(s). I need to be able to output these found strings in this format:

string(s) was found in

FILE - LINE NUMBER(S) IN FILE

I have tried this with an advanced find statement with grep but with no success. I have started hacking away at awk and perl but am running into difficulty as well. Does ayone know of a better way to accomplish this? Thanks in advance...

[ghostdog74]

what have you written so far?

[Mirrorball]

Here is a Python script you can modify:



import os
for root, dirs, files in os.walk('/'):
for file in files:
#open file, find your string and print line number, filename

[pmasiar]

os.walk() is a real gem, I missed it somehow - thanks for mentioning it :-) This is exactly what I love in python: smart, powerfull functions which are simple to use.

I don't even want to think how many convoluted lines it would take in Java :evil:

[ghostdog74]

you can use the find powertool too
something like this


find /dir -type f -print | xargs egrep -n "searchstring"

[dillzz]

I ended up getting it working through good old shell. Did a find through the whole system with a grep for strings >> new file. I then just did a simple for loop with the new file as the input and found exact numbers that way. Ugly as hell but thats what makes linux so great - there is more than one way to get stuff done.

I will check into the python. Thanks much!