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Anders Sandvig
Asked: 2009-05-20 03:38:09 +0800 CST

Recursive text search with grep and file patterns

  • 772

Given this example folder structure:

/folder1/file1.txt
/folder1/file2.djd
/folder2/file3.txt
/folder2/file2.fha

How do I do a recursive text search on all *.txt files with grep from "/"?

("grep -r <pattern> *.txt" fails when run from "/", since there are no .txt files in that folder.)

search command-line-interface grep

7 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    My version of GNU Grep has a switch for this:

    grep -R --include='*.txt' $Pattern

    Described as follows:

    --include=GLOB

    Search only files whose base name matches GLOB (using wildcard matching as described under --exclude).

    • 63

  2. If you have a large number of files it would be useful to incorporate xargs into the command to avoid an 'Argument list too long' error.

    find . -name '*.txt' -print | xargs grep <pattern>
    • 20

  3. you might be able to make use of your zsh's EXTENDED_GLOB option (docs)

    grep <pattern> **/*.txt
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  4. You may want to take a look at ack at http://betterthangrep.com, which has facilities for selecting files to search by filetype.

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  5. find . -name '*.txt' -type f -exec grep <pattern> {} \;
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  6. Mannis answer would fork a new grep-process for every textfile. If you have lots of textfiles there, you might consider grepping every file first and pick the .txt-files when thats done:

    grep -r <pattern> * | grep \.txt:

    That's more disk-intensive, but might be faster anyway.

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  7. It's 2019 and there's no way I would still use grep for recursive text searching.

    IMHO todays answers should include ripgrep:

    rg <pattern> -ttxt
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