Hi friends! 🤓 I am on a gnulinux and trying to list all files in the active directory and it’s subdirectories. I then want to pipe the output to “cat”. I want to pipe the output from cat into grep.

Please help! 😅

  • JoeyJoeJoeJr@lemmy.ml
    6·
    11 months ago

    grep -r string .

    The flag should go before the pattern.

    -r to search recursively, . refers to the current directory.

    Why use . instead of *? Because on it’s own, * will (typically) not match hidden files. See the last paragraph of the ‘Origin’ section of: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_(programming). Technically your ls command (lacking the -a) flag would also skip hidden files, but since your comment mentions finding the string in ‘any files,’ I figured hidden files should also be covered (the find commands listed would also find the hidden files).

    EDIT: Should have mentioned that -R is also recursive, but will follow symlinks, where -r will ignore them.