How do I search for text strings in multiple PHP files?

Question

Long story short, I got a folder with nearly 800,000 php files. I would like to search each file for a string and if it exists in that file, the file gets copied to another directory.

Is this possible from the terminal?

So far I got:

grep -i -n -r 'ppr-1792' * | cp $1 move_to_here

But this obviously doesn't work. $1 needs to be the file name that contains matching text.

What should I do?

Answer 1

You can use a for loop and test the return code of grep, or use grep -c (count matches) and see if the match count is greater than 1.

e.g.

for i in *
do
    grep -i -n 'Power' "$i"

    if [ "$?" -eq 0 ]
    then
            cp "$i" mvd
    fi
done

Answer 2

You can do it easily with a nice one liner:

grep -l -i -r -Z pattern | xargs -0 -I source cp source /target

Some comments how it works. Grep's -l option prints just a file name if there is a match in the file, so it produces a list of files to be copied. Xargs command constructs a command for each copy command and executes it. Xargs replaces argument named "source" with a file name read from standard input. Spaces and other funny characters in file names are handled with -Z and -0 options.