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up vote 3 down vote favorite

I know about 

grep -rin 'text' /path/to/direcotry

But I dont want to look up in all the files . I just need to check for occurrence of 'text' in all files named wscript. How can that be done ?

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3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

man grep:

   --include=GLOB
          Search  only  files whose base name matches GLOB (using wildcard
          matching as described under --exclude).

so try this:

grep -rin --include=wscript 'text' /path/to/files
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up vote 2 down vote 
 grep -rin 'text' `find /path/to/directory -name wscript`
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1  
did'nt work man. – Vihaan Verma Sep 23 '12 at 4:46
Note that the quotes around the find command are backquotes not regular quotes. – Isaac Rabinovitch Sep 23 '12 at 5:02
1  
The backticks are hard to read, I'd suggest using $() instead. I'd also recommend not to use command substitution for parsing find output, it'll likely break. A safer alternative would be to pipe it to xargs in a null-delimited format. – slhck♦ Sep 23 '12 at 8:14
I rolled this back to my version. @slhck 's version is fine, but it's completely different, and belongs in its own answer. – Isaac Rabinovitch Sep 23 '12 at 22:20
Note that @Serge's answer is better than mine. I even upvotted it! – Isaac Rabinovitch Sep 23 '12 at 22:21
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up vote 0 down vote 
grep -rin 'your-text' /path/to/text/file/text-file.txt

It works only with text files, though.

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That doesn't restrict the files by name. – Isaac Rabinovitch Sep 23 '12 at 5:43

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