Shell script to search for text in a file and copy file - Page 2 - UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

era · #8 04-20-2008

kja328: grep and friends work on text files; as long as the words you want to look for are visible in the file with "less" or some such, it should still work. You might get accidental matches in Word and Excel files because they contain a lot of metadata, including stuff which used to be visible in the file but which was subsequently deleted.

psychobeauty: To put this in a script which accepts the regular expression to search for as an argument, use "$1" as a placeholder.

Shell scripts receive their positional arguments in $1, $2, $3 etc. $# will contain the number of arguments.

Code:

#!/bin/sh

case $# in 1) ;; *) echo "syntax: $0 regex" >&2 ; exit 2;; esac

find /opt/efx/ian/original -name '*' -exec grep -l "$1" {} \; -exec cp {} /opt/efx/ian/copied \;

A better script would also allow you to specify the path to search and the path to copy those files to.

drl · #9 04-20-2008

Hi.

See grep and binaries - Linux Forums for additional suggestions on search MS Word files with *nix utilities ... cheers, drl

prabhukirans · #10 1 Week Ago

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yogesh Sawant

this will list all files in the given directory that contain the given string:

Code:

find /path/to/dir/ * | xargs grep abcde1234 | cut -d ":" -f1 | uniq

remaining is left for you to do

It's awesome..) works brilliant.

Thanks,
-Kiran

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