Find words in files in linux
March 7th, 2011
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After wanting to find text inside of files in Ubuntu I ran across a nice little post. They way it was described to do it works great. It uses the grep command.
Say you want to find some text called “my_function” in your scripts folder located at the /home/michael/scripts/ directory. Simply run the following command:
grep -i -n -r 'my_function' /home/michael/scripts/ |
Here is what is happening:
grep is function name to search a pattern in files
-i means ignore case
-n means output line number
-r search recursively
This makes it easy to edit the files with vim, and then jump straight to the line that you needed to edit.