Gfilui

I want to search recursively for a certain word, say MyWord, but I want to print the entire contents of all files that contain MyWord. How do I do this?

It turns out that I particularly care about binary sqlite files, both grepping them, and reading the result as a text file, rather than binary.

I would use:

sudo grep -rIlZ --exclude=$HISTFILE##*/ --exclude-dir=boot,dev,lib,media,mnt,proc,root,run,sys,/tmp,tmpfs,var '/' -e 'MyWord' | xargs -0 cat > MyOutputFile

• Drop sudo if not looking in system directories.


• Change (root directory) '/' to current directory '.' or specific directory ie '/home/me/stuff'
  


• Remove mnt to include Windows files mounted under mnt.


• Remove lib to include Linux source files


• Excluding directories necessary for speed. See: `grep`ing all files for a string takes a long time
  


• 
  --exclude=$HISTFILE##*/ is necessary if you run the command a second time or if the search string MyWord has ever been used in a different command before. This prevents 5 thousand history lines ($HISTFILE) from being included.


• 
  -r recursive, I skip binary files, lZ outputs a zero byte after each file name instead of the usual newline. Null (zero byte) terminators necessary for perl -0, sort -z and xargs used to cat (print out) the file contents.


• 
  > MyOutputFile sends output to file instead of screen. Leave this off for output to screen.

Note: Missing from output is the file name, just the file content is listed.

You can also use find with grep:

find . -type f -exec grep -wq 'MyWord' ; -exec cat >> /path/to/outfile ;

This will find files containing the word "MyWord" recursively and quite as soon as first match found then redirect the whole file content to a new file.

If your folder are not so big try:

grep -rz '.*MyWord.*' myfolder > output

if necessary add -a