Modifiers to the grep command across multiple files grep exclude directories Instead, navigate to the root of where would be useful to search, such as /home or /usr or /etc and then run the grep command with the recursive search flag (-r).

You can also use the -exec switch, but I find. Using GNU grep can be skipped if searching in current directory The -R options follows all symbolic links, unlike -r which follows symbolic.

To then search those files for a string: find /directory -type f -mtime -10 -mtime +5 -print0 xargs -0 grep -l expression.

This will find all files modified between 5 and 10 days ago: find /directory -type f -mtime -10 -mtime +5. To use grep to search for words in a file, type grep, the word or words you want to search for, the files you want to look in, and press .

Heres what I have so far and it doesnt work at all. Ive tried a bunch of grepping with a poor attempt at regex. Preferable each on a separate line in a txt file. This is not recommended as you would get the results from folders that aren’t relevant to your search, such as your configuration settings. You can use the find command to locate files 'of a certain age'. I have a bunch of files of random characters in several sub directories and am trying to grab every string of 8 consecutive alphanumeric characters from all the files.

To search all files, you can run the commands identified above but from the root of your system. Note that this could also be used to search all files with the same name but different extensions by changing where the wildcard character appears. Which searchers all files in the current directory with the given file extension.

Grep all files in directory for string