How can I use ack (preferably ack) or grep to search for a string in a list of files?

Question

I want to search for a string "my-search-string" in any files called search-this-one.html

In all subdirectories of my current working directory.

I want a list of full paths of the files that contain this string. There are hundreds of files called search-this-one.html, any number of them could contain the string.

Has anyone had any success doing this.

I can get a list of files like this..

find . -type f -name "search-this-one.html"

I've tried a variety of grep and ack switches on this, all the other related answers search only for filenames that match the search string.

Answer 1

If you're running ack 2.x, you can use the -x option to get input from STDIN, much like xargs.

ack -g search-this-one.html | ack -x pattern

The ack -g says "Find any text files with names that match search-this-one.html", and then that's piped into ack -x which takes its list of input files from STDIN.

Also works for searching for filenames with regex:

ack -g '\.*.conf$' | ack -x searchString

Answer 2

You could use xargs:

find . -type f -name "search-this-one.html" | xargs grep "my-search-string"

With the additional -l switch to grep, you would get a list of matching files without the exact matching position.

Answer 3

Add an -exec in your find command:

find . -type f -name "search-this-one.html" -exec grep "my-search-string" {} \;

So that find will output a list of file names on which the command grep "my_search_string" will be performed.

To get the files and the occurrences in which this happens, add -H to the grep:

find . -type f -name "search-this-one.html" -exec grep -H "my-search-string" {} \;

Answer 4

For whatever it's worth, I've never found a succinct way to do this using ack, but the following works:

ack --type-add foo:is:search-this-one.html --foo my-search-string

Explanation:

• --type-add foo:is:search-this-one.html : this adds (for the duration of this one command) a new type, foo, defined as all files whose name is search-this-one.html
• --foo : search only files of the type foo

Also, further to @fedorqui et al, you can instead use the -exec cmd {} + option to find, which puts all the matched filenames into the command before running it, eschewing the need for the -H flag:

find . -name search-this-one.html -type f -exec grep "my-search-string" {} +