grep -- list file name where match is found

Question

I have a bunch of .html files in a directory. I want to look through each file and match a pattern (MD5). All of that is easy enough. The problem is I need to know what file the match was found in.

cat *.html | grep 75447A831E943724DD2DE9959E72EE31

Only returns the HTML page content where the match is found, but it doesn't tell me the file which it was found in. How can I get grep to show me the filename where my match is found?

The provided suggestion really doesn't work.... All I get is 'standard input' cat *.html | grep -i -H 1ee024007823cc0bfbefba98ba1e1f4c (standard input): — BeMy Friend, Feb 19 '15 at 07:02
you're missing the point. You don't need to use cat. The cat prevents grep from distinguishing individual files. — muru, Feb 19 '15 at 07:17

score 72 · Answer 1 · edited Feb 19 '15 at 06:14

72

grep -H 75447A831E943724DD2DE9959E72EE31 *.html

-H, --with-filename
              Print the file name for each match. This is
              the default when there is more than one file
              to search.

edited Feb 19 '15 at 06:14

muru

197,895
55
485
740

answered Feb 19 '15 at 06:09

Cyrus

5,554

score 33 · Answer 2 · edited Feb 19 '15 at 07:47

33

I use this one all the time to look for files containing a string, RECURSIVELY in a directory (that means, traversing any sub sub sub folder) grep -Ril "yoursearchtermhere"

R is to search recursively (following symlinks)
i is to make it case insensitive
l is just to list the name of the files.

so answering your question grep -l '75447A831E943724DD2DE9959E72EE31' *.html will do but you can just do grep -Ril '75447A831E943724DD2DE9959E72EE31' to look for that string, case insensitive, in any file in any subfolder

edited Feb 19 '15 at 07:47

muru

197,895
55
485
740

answered Feb 19 '15 at 07:36

thebugfinder

2,261

macOS requires a file def always, may it be a wildcard. Otherwise, it assumes input from stdin (grep: warning: recursive search of stdin, whatever recursive stdin input would mean :-). In other words: grep -Ril 'texttofind' * – Ville Jun 09 '18 at 23:47
grep -RiH 'pattern' shows files name and matched line – Ikrom Oct 12 '18 at 08:35

score 11 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 19 '15 at 07:07

11

You can try this

grep -rl '75447A831E943724DD2DE9959E72EE31' * > found.txt

answered Feb 19 '15 at 07:07

Red Aura

468

score 4 · Answer 4 · edited Jun 15 '17 at 18:36

4

grep -r -H 75447A831E943724DD2DE9959E72EE31 *.html | awk -F : ' { print $1 } '

Alternative to

grep -r -l 75447A831E943724DD2DE9959E72EE31 *.html

Doing above will search recursively in the folder and subfolders and print the path of the file...

edited Jun 15 '17 at 18:36

Zanna

70,465

answered Jun 15 '17 at 18:22

Drew

41

score 1 · Answer 5 · edited Sep 22 '20 at 13:31

1

I would do it like this:

find . -type f -name=*.html -exec grep -H 75447A831E943724DD2DE9959E72EE31 {} \;

edited Sep 22 '20 at 13:31

Eliah Kagan

117,780

answered Sep 22 '20 at 11:08

azAttis

11

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Jun 15 '17 at 19:31

The answer posted by Cyrus is absolutely proper and is The Right Way^TM to do it with grep if we only need to find files. When filenames need to additional parsing or operations on the matched filenames, we can resort to using while loop with if statement. Here's an example where list of filenames comes from very commonly used find+while structure for safe parsing of filenames.

find -type f -name "*.html" -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' filename
do
    if grep -q 'PATTERN' "$filename"
    then
        printf "%s found in %s\n" 'PATTERN' "$filename"
        # Here we can insert another command or function
        # to perform other operations on the filename
    fi
done

Related: Recursively search a pattern/text only in the specified file name of a directory?, especially muru's answer demonstrating grep's --include flag. — Eliah Kagan, Aug 16 '17 at 18:34

grep -- list file name where match is found

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