How can I find a file by its content on Linux?

Question

How can I find a file by its content on Linux in the command line?

For example, I want to find a file containing the word "helo" on my computer.

soandos · Answer 1 · 2011-12-02 07:59:50Z

up vote 12 down vote

Use:

grep -lir "helo" /path/to/dir

edited Dec 2 '11 at 7:59

soandos
14.6k64480

answered Sep 21 '11 at 7:56

quanta
38316

kockiren · Answer 2 · 2011-09-21 10:12:21Z

up vote 2 down vote

You can create a file named grepall in /usr/local/bin/ with following content:

find -type f -exec grep -q $1 {} \; -print

then you can search for content by use grepall something

answered Sep 21 '11 at 10:12

kockiren
21518

1

That's a lot of typing when you can just grep -r – Matt H Sep 21 '11 at 12:05

With the Command find you can grep recursive through directories and grep in all files. – kockiren Sep 22 '11 at 7:28

Adam Eberlin · Answer 3 · 2011-09-21 08:13:46Z

up vote 1 down vote

egrep -R "hello" /path/to/dir

answered Sep 21 '11 at 8:13

Adam Eberlin
1292

Korjavin Ivan · Answer 4 · 2011-09-21 10:05:53Z

up vote 1 down vote

Evil way: grep "something" */*/*

answered Sep 21 '11 at 10:05

Korjavin Ivan
1165

migrated from serverfault.com Sep 21 '11 at 11:03