Locating a file without knowing its name, only its content?

Question

I have a hard drive filled with files, and I need to find a specific file without knowing its name. All I know is that the file contains a list of email addresses. Is there any way I can locate it?

GUI or cli? both are in the dupes above :) – Jacob Vlijm Jul 30 '15 at 14:26 — Jacob Vlijm, Jul 30 '15 at 14:26

A.B. · Answer 1 · 2015-07-30T15:37:52.980

1

Via find and grep

I don't use grep -r because in POSIX systems, you don't find -r parameter for grep.

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep 'your_email_address' {} \;

Or

find . -type f -exec grep -l -- 'your_email_address' +

There are many possibilities.

The command finds all files in the current folder and subfolders and passes the result to grep. grep finds the files with your_email_address.

edited Jul 30 '15 at 15:37

answered Jul 30 '15 at 14:17

A.B.

90,397

1

Why not just grep -r 'your_email_address'? – saiarcot895 Jul 30 '15 at 14:19
Hmm, I'm a friend of find =) – A.B. Jul 30 '15 at 14:20
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In its present state, this will not give the name of the file that contains the match. It will only give the match. – saiarcot895 Jul 30 '15 at 14:21
Sorry, corrected – A.B. Jul 30 '15 at 14:22
@saiarcot895 And in POSIX systems, you don't find -r parameter for grep. – A.B. Jul 30 '15 at 14:26
@A.B. if you like find, why not just use grep -l with it? e.g. find . -type f -exec grep -l -- 'email_address' {} + – steeldriver Jul 30 '15 at 14:29
@A.B. since grep can take multiple files on the command line, {} + should be more efficient than {} \; in the second command. In your first command, \; seems superfluous since {} is an argument to xargs, not find -exec. – steeldriver Jul 30 '15 at 15:35
@steeldriverb thank you again, in on mobile and in a train it's hard to change answers. :) I was always in the xargs mode. – A.B. Jul 30 '15 at 15:39

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 30 '15 at 14:20

You can try using grep -r:

Here is an example where I grepped for the text "listen_address" in any file from my home dir:

aploetz@dockingBay94:~$ grep -r listen_address *
Documents/stackOverFlowAnswer_connectToCassandra.txt~:If you are connecting to Cassandra from your localhost only (a sandbox machine), then you can set the `listen_address` in your cassandra.yaml:
Documents/stackOverFlowAnswer_connectToCassandra.txt~:    listen_address: localhost
Documents/stackOverFlowAnswer_connectToCassandra.txt:If you are connecting to Cassandra from your localhost only (a sandbox machine), then you can set the `listen_address` in your cassandra.yaml:
Documents/stackOverFlowAnswer_connectToCassandra.txt:    listen_address: localhost
Documents/stackOverFlowAnswer_connectToCassandra.txt:    listen_address: dockingBay94
Ubuntu One/cassandraClass/cassandra.yaml:listen_address: $(HOSTNAME)
Ubuntu One/cassandraClass/cassandra.yaml:# Leaving this blank will set it to the same value as listen_address

Adding the -l option means you'll just get the filename, without listing the file contents. — Arronical, Jul 30 '15 at 14:25

Locating a file without knowing its name, only its content?

2 Answers2