Gepping everything - How to use grep to find files that contains text.

Grepping everything

Often, when working with servers and other restricted applications, the only tool that we have is a command line. In such cases, especially when working with complex bash scripts and automation we need to use tools like grep.

Well, sometimes the old fashion grep from a pipe is not sufficient to archive what we want. Imagine the following scenario:

You have a bash script, that imports several other scripts, and you have identified that you have an error in one function. The problem is, you don’t know in which file this function is implemented, neither can list all the places that it is called, so in this case, how can you do it? For your luck, you are not the first person to face this issue, and we already have a solution for it! The solution is grep with the recursive option.

To use it is very simple:

grep -rlF "<String>" <path_to_Search>

This will print out all the files with the corresponding string in it. In case you want to see all the lines, just write a for loop:

string="<String_to_search>"
loop_list=$(grep -rlF "${string}" <path_to_Search>)

for var in loop_list; do 
    echo "in ${var}"
    cat $var | grep "${string}";
done

More on what is being done

The command grep -rlF is using the flags -r for recursive, -l or --files-with-matches that will print all the files with matches and -F for Fixed strings, that will allow you to search with special characters such as . or ?.