Hi friends! 🤓 I am on a gnulinux and trying to list all files in the active directory and it’s subdirectories. I then want to pipe the output to “cat”. I want to pipe the output from cat into grep.

Please help! 😅

  • sighofannoyance@lemmy.worldOP
    4·
    2 years ago

    So I could use something like grep string -R * to find any occurrence of the string in any files in the folder and sub-folders.

    thank you!

    • JoeyJoeJoeJr@lemmy.ml
      6·
      2 years ago

      grep -r string .

      The flag should go before the pattern.

      -r to search recursively, . refers to the current directory.

      Why use . instead of *? Because on it’s own, * will (typically) not match hidden files. See the last paragraph of the ‘Origin’ section of: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_(programming). Technically your ls command (lacking the -a) flag would also skip hidden files, but since your comment mentions finding the string in ‘any files,’ I figured hidden files should also be covered (the find commands listed would also find the hidden files).

      EDIT: Should have mentioned that -R is also recursive, but will follow symlinks, where -r will ignore them.