Is it possible to search for a string from all the files on the harddisk?

Akhran · 09-10-2005, 01:33 AM

I'll like to know which files (if any) on the entire harddisk have the string 'xhost' in them. Is there a command to do that?

Thanks !

logicalfuzz · 09-10-2005, 01:40 AM

Code:

grep

can help you. refer the man page.

eddiebaby1023 · 09-10-2005, 09:07 AM

find will be more useful before you can use grep.

blindcoder · 09-10-2005, 10:09 AM

As root you can do this:

Code:

# grep xhost / -R

This will probably take a few hours to complete.
Can you just tell us what you want to do? Instead of insisting on a way to achieve your goal, maybe someone else has a better idea on how to achieve it.

Greetings,
Benjamin

logicalfuzz · 09-10-2005, 12:20 PM

eddiebaby,
AFAIK find cannot search inside files.... can it? how do you do that?

tkedwards · 09-13-2005, 12:22 AM

No it can't AFAIK but you can easily call grep for each file you find:

Code:

find / -exec grep xhost '{}' \;

However I can't see the advantage of this - it would be considerably slower than just doing a grep -R because every time a file is found a new grep process is started. However if you only wanted to search through some files on the disk, eg. all files modified after a certain date, then this would be the way to go.

blindcoder · 09-13-2005, 01:00 AM

Code:

find / -exec grep xhost '{}' \;

That would be absolutely useless because grep would be called with one parameter only and thus not output the filename. So you'd have lots of lines with xhost somewhere or other but no idea in which file they were found.

Greetings,
Benjamin

tkedwards · 09-13-2005, 01:22 AM

Yes good point

should've tested that before posting.

Code:

find . -name '*.[ch]' | xargs grep -l thing

This is a better example that will actually work.

Wim Sturkenboom · 09-13-2005, 06:09 AM

Code:

find / -name "*" -exec grep -H -n xhost {} \;

will also do the trick