

You need to use the following command: grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e 'pattern'. It is designed to find the files containing the necessary text according to patterns in the entire data streams. With this command, if you have duplicate filenames, you will definitely lose data during the move operations. The best way of finding files that contain a specific text is by using the grep command. It’s a simplistic text editor with all the basic features you’d expect.
: /< searchterm > Find text in files using GNOME Text Editor The GNOME Text Editor is the text editor that comes with the GNOME desktop. vim < filepath > Enter the following Vim command and hit Enter.In this case I had a bunch of files (with unique names) in subdirectories, and used this command to copy them all to the current directory:Īs before, this is a dangerous command, so be careful. To search in a text file, first, open it in Vim. Here’s another example of a “find and copy” command I just used, though in this case it was a “find and move” command.

If you ever need to use the Linux find command to find a large collection of files and copy them to another location, I hope this has been helpful. (The -n option appears to work on MacOS systems, but -no-clobber does not.) Be sure to test this command before using it on something important I haven’t tested it yet, I just read the man page for the cp command.) The -n option of the cp command means “no clobber,” and you can also type that as cp -no-clobber on some systems, such as Linux. type f -name "*.mp3" -exec cp /tmp/MusicFiles \ Use the grep command Use the ripgrep command Use the ack command Use the find command. Then run the command less filename, where.
#LINUX FIND WORD IN FILE HOW TO#
In short, here's the find command I used to find and copy all of those files:įind. How to Find All Files Containing Specific Text on Linux. Crack open a terminal window and navigate to a directory containing one or more text files that you want to view. In this case I didn't want to do a cp -r command or tar command to preserve the directory structure instead, I wanted all of the files to end up in the same directory (so I could easily import them into iTunes).

I ran into a situation this morning where I needed to use the Linux find command to (a) find all the MP3 files beneath my current directory and (b) copy them to another directory. Linux find/copy FAQ: How can I use the find command to find many files and copy them all to a directory?
