linux find utilty

to find a content in a directory ... whichever file contains it .. needs to display ..
similar like windows utility..

find . -name 'hi'

it will search the filename hi in current directory...
is there any find utility by which i can find search pattern in n number of file and it contains it will be displayed.

Your help will be highly appreciated!
Thanks
Vaibhav

Moved to Tech Board.

You might want to research find and grep, or maybe you are just looking to use ls with suitable arguments.

To search a single file for an instance of a string "foo":

Code:

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grep foo <filename>

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To recursively search all files under a particular directory for a string "foo", and display the names of files which contain that string:

Code:

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grep -Hrl foo <dir>

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by vaibhavs17

it will search the filename hi in current directory...
is there any find utility by which i can find search pattern in n number of file and it contains it will be displayed.

Your help will be highly appreciated!
Thanks
Vaibhav

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I wrote a really nice GUI app to do (in part) exactly that -- recursive grep searches which then present all the files, with finds highlighted AND indexed!! It's great for, eg, library includes.

TkCodex

Unfortunately, I wrote it mostly for myself, so the configuration is sort of limited and a couple of people have been unable to figure out how it works without emailing me, although there's documentation at the site (qv "Simple Command Lookup"). Anyway, have a look, if you have a problem I'll be only too happy to explain anything. It's perl/Tk and needs no compiling.

An example: if you want to search all of "/usr/include" and its subdirectories for a term:

TkCodex /usr/include c,h "some_struct_def"


And you get a nice little GUI ranking the results, which you can then use to view the files with the finds highlighted and a clickable sidebar index of all the corresponding line numbers. I use it everyday.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by brewbuck

To search a single file for an instance of a string "foo":

Code:

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grep foo <filename>

---

To recursively search all files under a particular directory for a string "foo", and display the names of files which contain that string:

Code:

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grep -Hrl foo <dir>

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this command is really amazing. can you tell me what does -H options with grep.
I could understand the usage of r and l option ... r used for recursive search and l used for display list of file which contains patter foo

Type:

Code:

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man grep

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and you will find

Quote:

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

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