Need help finding a text file on my hard drives

Dafydd · 08-07-2016, 04:46 PM

I have lost a text file on my computer. I have the drive on my desktop, and 2 remote drives, which contain backups and archives. There is one word in the file that I have only used once. If I could find that word, I would have a path to the file.

How can I search for that word? I have read t he manual for 'find' but it is information overload for me.

Can someone help

notKlaatu · 08-07-2016, 04:51 PM

Code:

find /path/to/drive/or/dir/you/want/to/search -type f -exec grep -i theOneWordYouUsedOnlyOnce {} \;

You could further narrow the scope of your search if you know for sure that the text file is named ".txt" or something about its name, but I guess since the file is lost, it's best to throw a wider net.

Sefyir · 08-07-2016, 07:35 PM

Code:

grep -r 'word' /dira /dirb /dirc

It's probably not a binary file so you can use the -I flag to speed it up (by ignoring binary files)

This would probably be faster then the find / grep since the above will run grep for every single file it finds. unless you have more information about the file to filter - like its last modified time (more then / less then a week?), or maybe its size. If it's a text file, probably smaller then 512K

Dafydd · 08-11-2016, 10:11 PM

Code:

find /path/to/drive/or/dir/you/want/to/search -type f -exec grep -i theOneWordYouUsedOnlyOnce {} \;

/Code:

This performed exactly as I wanted. If the word exist it got lost in the 50+ pages of hits. I swear I have only used the targeted word "dreamed" once since I got this new computer. Seems like all the message about 'dreamed of vacations'etc got tags.. I did not know my computer was saving all that juck.

Thanks for the feedback and help
Dave

JJJCR · 08-12-2016, 12:37 AM

Quote:

grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"

above code taken from this link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...tring-on-linux

or try this command below it's a recursive search:

Quote:

find /home/folderName -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0r grep -H 'secret_word'

timl · 08-12-2016, 12:47 AM

I normally use

Quote:

find /path/to/drive/or/dir/you/want/to/search -type f -iname *theOneWordYouUsedOnlyOnce*

which zeroes in on what you want

suicidaleggroll · 08-12-2016, 11:11 AM

You need to get more specific about this file. How long ago was it modified? Would it be owned by your user or another user? How big/small is it? Are there any particular characters you know are in the file name, or do you know the file extension? All of these will help filter out the 50+ pages of trash. "dreamed" isn't exactly a unique word, there are plenty of system configuration files, browser cache files, etc. that can contain that word, so you need to get more specific about the file you're looking for to separate it from the pack.

Quote:

find /path/to/drive/or/dir/you/want/to/search -type f -iname *theOneWordYouUsedOnlyOnce*

That would only find files with 'theOneWordYouUsedOnlyOnce' in the name of the file, not in the contents.

notKlaatu's suggestion in post #2 is the right approach, now you just need to start adding more filters to the find to get rid of the junk. The iname, mtime, size, and user flags would probably be the most appropriate.

Doug G · 08-12-2016, 05:46 PM

grep -irl works for me