linux + find word/string in file under directory

Question

I have the following command

find /var -type f -exec grep "param1" {} \; -print

With this command I can find the param1 string in any file under /var but the time that it take for this is very long.

I need another possibility to find string in file but much more faster then my example

Answer 1

You could try using grep directly as in

grep -R "param1" /var/*

Answer 2

fast search is mostly achieved by having an "index" of the content, kind of a "lookup table". there are exist some free search engines which build an index of input files and give you very, very fast results:

• lucene
• xapian

i doubt that you want to go that way, but just to give you another option :)

Answer 3

There are a a couple factors at work here:

First, by using -exec, find is spawning a new process for grep for every file it finds.

This can be managed either by using xargs as in Felipe Alvarez's answer (I wrote a blog post about this 5+ years ago) or by using -exec grep param1 {} + (note the + instead of \;). When using +, "the command line is built by appending each selected file name at the end; the total number of invocations of the command will be much less than the number of matched files" (from find man page)

Second, the number and size of files under /var is potentially very large.

Can you add parameters in addition to -type f to limit the files you're searching. find has options to limit by time, owner, name pattern, etc. For example, you could do:

find /var -type f -name "access*log" -mtime -7 -exec grep param1 {} +

That will find files modified in the last seven days with names starting with "access" and ending with "log". Only those matching files will be part of the exec/grep.

Answer 4

find ...[blah]..... -print0 | xargs -0 grep -e "regex"

Answer 5

I advise to use:

grep -RInis "param1" /var

For more details see

man grep

If speed is of such importance, you might want to consider fgrep, which might not prove to be faster depending on the implementation.