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Baron Yugovich
Asked: 2018-04-18 14:26:13 +0800 CST

Grep to return entire file content

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I want to search recursively for a certain word, say MyWord, but I want to print the entire contents of all files that contain MyWord. How do I do this?

It turns out that I particularly care about binary sqlite files, both grepping them, and reading the result as a text file, rather than binary.

command-line grep

3 Answers

  1. You can also use find with grep:

    find . -type f -exec grep -wq 'MyWord' {} \; -exec cat {} >> /path/to/outfile \;

    This will find files containing the word "MyWord" recursively and quite as soon as first match found then redirect the whole file content to a new file.

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  2. I would use:

    sudo grep -rIlZ --exclude=${HISTFILE##*/} --exclude-dir={boot,dev,lib,media,mnt,proc,root,run,sys,/tmp,tmpfs,var} '/' -e 'MyWord' | xargs -0 cat > MyOutputFile
    • Drop sudo if not looking in system directories.
    • Change (root directory) '/' to current directory '.' or specific directory ie '/home/me/stuff'
    • Remove mnt to include Windows files mounted under mnt.
    • Remove lib to include Linux source files
    • Excluding directories necessary for speed. See: `grep`ing all files for a string takes a long time
    • --exclude=${HISTFILE##*/} is necessary if you run the command a second time or if the search string MyWord has ever been used in a different command before. This prevents 5 thousand history lines ($HISTFILE) from being included.
    • -r recursive, I skip binary files, lZ outputs a zero byte after each file name instead of the usual newline. Null (zero byte) terminators necessary for perl -0, sort -z and xargs used to cat (print out) the file contents.
    • > MyOutputFile sends output to file instead of screen. Leave this off for output to screen.

    Note: Missing from output is the file name, just the file content is listed.

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  3. If your folder are not so big try:

    grep -rz '.*MyWord.*'  myfolder > output

    if necessary add -a

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