Mac OS X Terminal: Search output of another command with grep

Question

I am trying to get the output of an ls command and search that list for a regex expression... Effectively, it will search every file name in the folder for the regex expression. I put together a simple example of what I thought was the right way to do this, but clearly was not:

$ ls ~/Desktop/testFolder | grep -rn "contents"

I know, I can make a script for this where I pipe the output from the 'ls' to a text file, and then grep that.. but I am asking how to do this WITHOUT a multistep process or script.

Answer 1

Your command should work, although you do not need the -r option in the grep command. What happens when you try running your command that is not what you expected?

ls /path | grep string

The above works for me.

You could also try looking at the find command:

find ~/Desktop/testFolder -iname '*contents*'

Hope this helps and good luck!

Answer 2

Your only mistake is setting the -r option on grep.

Answer 3

Do you want: ls ~/Desktop/testFolder/*contents*