How to search for strings inside files in a folder?

Question

Is there any utility to make searches for a string inside ASCII files to avoid command line searches?

How to make a command line search, for example for the string "test" inside all files in the directory /var/x/?

Answer 1

You can use searchmonkey. The tool is available in the repositories, so you can simply

sudo apt-get install searchmonkey

On the other hand, command line search with grep is really intended for that...

Here is a screenshot from searchmonkey

Answer 2

Unfortunately grep does a very poor job of searching inside Word (.doc) files, but you can pipe catdoc output into grep. I'm no programmer but this little script works well for me:

#!/bin/bash
export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto'
echo -e "\n
Welcome to scandocs. This will search .doc (NOT .docx) files in this directory for a given string. \n
Type in the text string you want to find... \n"
read response
find . -name "*.doc" | 
while read i; do catdoc "$i" | 
grep -iH --label="$i" "$response"; done

All improvements and suggestions welcome!

Answer 3

You can use regexxer it is a great GUI search/replace tool for regular expressions.

you can download by:

sudo apt-get install regexxer

Answer 4

I assume that your first question is about a GUI alternative to the grep command. I can't help you with that, I always find the command line very effective.

As for the command line, try

grep "test" /var/x/

If you want to search recursively (i.e. not only in /var/x/, but also in subdirectories thereof), do

grep -R "test" /var/x/

To avoid grepping the files which grep thinks to be binary, use the -I option:

grep -I "test" /var/x/

If grep thinks a file is binary (based on first few bytes of the file), it will assume it does not match instead of going through the whole file.