I want to search recursively for a certain word, say MyWord, but I want to print the entire contents of all files that contain MyWord. How do I do this?
It turns out that I particularly care about binary sqlite files, both grepping them, and reading the result as a text file, rather than binary.
You can also use find with grep:
find . -type f -exec grep -wq 'MyWord' {} \; -exec cat {} >> /path/to/outfile \;
This will find files containing the word "MyWord" recursively and quite as soon as first match found then redirect the whole file content to a new file.
-a option to the grep above if you have GNU grep.
– αғsнιη
Apr 18 '18 at 02:40
I would use:
sudo grep -rIlZ --exclude=${HISTFILE##*/} --exclude-dir={boot,dev,lib,media,mnt,proc,root,run,sys,/tmp,tmpfs,var} '/' -e 'MyWord' | xargs -0 cat > MyOutputFile
sudo if not looking in system directories.'/' to current directory '.' or specific directory ie '/home/me/stuff'mnt to include Windows files mounted under mnt.lib to include Linux source files--exclude=${HISTFILE##*/} is necessary if you run the command a second time or if the search string MyWord has ever been used in a different command before. This prevents 5 thousand history lines ($HISTFILE) from being included.-r recursive, I skip binary files, lZ outputs a zero byte after each file name instead of the usual newline. Null (zero byte) terminators necessary for perl -0, sort -z and xargs used to cat (print out) the file contents.> MyOutputFile sends output to file instead of screen. Leave this off for output to screen.Note: Missing from output is the file name, just the file content is listed.
cat > MyOutputFile and excluded 5 thousand lines of bash terminal history file from output.
– WinEunuuchs2Unix
Apr 18 '18 at 00:01
If your folder are not so big try:
grep -rz '.*MyWord.*' myfolder > output
if necessary add -a
-A,-B,-C) may be more useful – steeldriver Apr 18 '18 at 01:58