Grep text files only

Active 4 years, 8 months ago. Viewed 4k times. I use following command to search for string ELF in plain text files under the current directory recursively: grep ELF -r. How can I specify it to search only in plain text files that are not source code?

Improve this question. Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' k gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Tim Tim 1. For matches in js and html files, the outputs are too long because their contents are long, making matches in plain text files difficult to see. Thanks for the suggestions.

How can I limit my query to only files within a certain length, and how can I do an initial query which displays only a limited number of matches per file?

If you only want to search in a subset of text files, tell us which subset. Gilles: only plain text files which are not source code. Add a comment.

Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Aaron Feldman 1 1 silver badge 3 3 bronze badges. Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' k gold badges silver badges bronze badges. The output shows only the lines with the exact match. If there are any other words or characters in the same line, the grep does not include it in the search results.

Do not forget to use quotation marks whenever there is a space or a symbol in a search pattern. Here is a comparison of the results without and with the -x operator in our grep command:. Sometimes, you only need to see the names of the files that contain a word or string of characters and exclude the actual lines.

To print only the filenames that match your search, use the -l operator:. The output shows the exact filenames that contain phoenix in the current directory but does not print the lines with the corresponding word:. As a reminder, use the recursive search operator -r to include all subdirectories in your search. When grep prints results with many matches, it comes handy to see the line numbers.

Append the -n operator to any grep command to show the line numbers. We will search for Phoenix in the current directory, show two lines before and after the matches along with their line numbers. Individual files, such as log files, can contain many matches for grep search patterns.

Limit the number of lines in the grep output by adding the -m option and a number to the command. In this case, the terminal prints the first two matches it finds in the sample file. If you do not specify a file and search all files in a directory, the output prints the first two results from every file along with the filename that contains the matches.

The grep command is highly flexible with many useful operators and options. By combining grep commands, you can get powerful results and find the text hiding in thousands of files. What is the grep Command? Was this article helpful? Goran Jevtic. Working with multiple departments and on various projects, he has developed an extraordinary understanding of cloud and virtualization technology trends and best practices.

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Given below is the sample Output:. When you are searching for abc, grep will match all sorts of things, viz. You can compel the grep command to select only those lines that contain matches to form whole words those that match only abc word , as shown below:.

The grep command has the ability to report the number of times a particular pattern has been matched for each file using the -c count option as shown below :. In addition, users may use the '-n' option preceding each output line with the number of the line in the text file from which it was obtained as shown below :. Users may make use of the -v option to print inverts the match, which means it would match only those lines that do not contain the given word. For instance, print all lines that do not contain the word par by using the following command:.

You must use the -l option to list file names whose contents mention a particular word, for instance, the word 'primary', using the following command:.

Lastly, you have the option to compel grep to display output in specific colors by using the following command:. There could be situations wherein you might want to search multiple patterns in a given file or set of files.

In such scenarios, you should use the ' -e' command-line option that grep provides. For example, suppose you want to search for words "how", "to", and "forge" in all the text files present in your current working directory, then here's how you can do this:. The ' -e' command-line option also helps in scenarios wherein the pattern begins with a hyphen -.

For example, if you want to search for, say, "-how", then the following command won't be helpful:. It's when you use the -e command-line option, the command understands what exactly you are trying to search in this case:.

In case you want to limit the grep output to a particular number of lines, you can do that using the ' -m' command-line option. For example, suppose you want to search for the word "how" in testfile1. But the requirement is for grep to stop searching after 3 lines containing the searched pattern have been found. So, to do this, you can run the following command:. So for example, if you have a bash script that has a loop, and you want to fetch one match per loop iteration, then using 'grep -m1' will do the needful.

If you want, you can also make the grep command obtain patterns from a file. The tool's -f command-line option lets you do this. For example, suppose you want to search all the. Up until now, we have seen that by default grep matches and displays complete lines that contain search patterns.

But if the requirement is to make grep only display those lines that completely match the searched pattern, then this can be done using the '-x' command-line option. And the pattern you want to search is "how are you? So to make sure that grep only displays lines that completely match this pattern, use it in the following way:. There might be situations wherein you don't need the grep command to produce anything in the output. Instead, you just want to know whether or not a match was found based on the command's exit status.

This can be achieved using the -q command-line option. In the case of grep, the command exits with '0' status when it's successful meaning, a match was found , while it exits with status '1' when no match was found.