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Mac Terminal Script Look For A Text String In A File: Best Practices and Examples



You can choose one of the below depending on your taste and needs. Supposing you need to search for files containing text - "async", recursively in current directory, you can do so in one of the ways like below:


Ignacio's Answer is great and helped me find the files containing certain text. The only issue I was facing was that when running this command all the files would be listed, including one where the pattern did not show up.




Mac Terminal Script Look For A Text String In A File




If the file you are working on is not so big, and temporarily storing it in a variable is no problem, then you can use Bash string substitution on the whole file at once - there's no need to go over it line by line:


I used this format - but...I found I had to run it three or more times to get it to actually change every instance which I found extremely strange. Running it once would change some in each file but not all. Running exactly the same string two-four times would catch all instances.


The Finder offers a similar function: the Find By Content search. (Press Command-F in the Finder, select Content in the Search For Items Whose pop-up menu, and enter a search string in the text field.) But the Finder searches only inside files it has indexed, and it ignores hidden system files unless you expressly choose to search for visible and invisible files and add your System folder to the search.


At its most basic, you tell grep what to look for and where: grep AppleTalk /etc/services, for example. Here, you tell grep to look for AppleTalk in the services file located in the /etc directory. (This useful file contains a list of network port numbers for commonly used services.) The command displays each line that contains your search string:


In the previous example, grep ran in a specific folder, checking all the files it contained. What if you want to run grep on a folder and its subfolders, or you want grep to look for the string regardless of case? You need to add options. For example, to search for Waldenanywhere in a folder or its subfolders, use the-r(recursive) option: grep -r Walden /Documents/*.


. This command looks in a special dictionary file for words containing the lowercase letter a. It then looks for words containing e in the results, and so on, finally returning only those words that contain all five vowels.


By using the grep command, you can customize how the tool searches for a pattern or multiple patterns in this case. You can grep multiple strings in different files and directories. The tool prints all lines that contain the words you specify as a search pattern.


You can use grep to search multiple strings in a certain type of file only. If you want to monitor log files in one directory or if you want to search through all text files, use an asterisk and the file extension instead of a file name.


To list the exact files that you want to search in a text file, use the search criteria in the file stringlist.txt, to search the files listed in filelist.txt, and then to store the results in the file results.out, type:


AWK, being a text processing utility, is quite appropriate for such task. It can do simple replacements and much more advanced ones based on regular expressions. It provides two functions: sub() and gsub(). The first one only replaces only the first occurrence, while the second - replaces occurrences in whole string. For instance, if we have string one potato two potato , this would be the result:


Here is the 2nd work-around: use my rgr (Ripgrep Replace) wrapper script I have written around Ripgrep which adds the -R option to replace contents on your disk. Installation is simple. Just follow the instructions at the top of that file. Usage is super simple too:


The fileinput module provides support for processing lines of input from one or more files given in the command-line arguments (sys.argv). For example, create the following script called "test_fileinput.py":


For simple text string operations such as string search and replacement, you can use the built-in string functions (e.g., str.replace(old, new)). For complex pattern search and replacement, you need to master regular expression (regex).


Let's say there a file called "abc_deh.xyz", what command do i use to find the location of that file in mac terminal by using solely the search term "deh"?So, basically, I am asking how to search for a file by text contained in its name. I need to find files that I forgot the whole name, that would be more helpful.


Searching for patterns of text in files or text streams is one of the most common tasks you'll perform in your sysadmin career. This is a valuable skill that allows you to check a variety of system configurations, analyze data, troubleshoot logs, and perform many other activities.


The most basic way to use grep is searching for text in a single file. To do this, type grep followed by the text pattern to search for and the file name to search in. For example, to find which port the Secure Shell (SSH) daemon uses, search for Port in file /etc/ssh/sshd_config:


In the previous example, when you searched for Port in the SSH configuration file, grep returned two lines. The line you were looking for, Port 22, and an additional line containing the search pattern. In some cases, that's exactly what you want. In other cases, grep could find too many entries that you're not interested in, requiring you to sort through them to find the desired information.


Similar to finding text patterns in a single file, you can use grep to find text in multiple files or directories. To find text in multiple files simultaneously, specify which files to search from after the first file name, or use a shell wildcard such as * for all files. For example, to search for a configuration in two files:


Similar to other Unix utilities, grep also acts on stdin when you pipe the output of another command into it. This is a fast and useful way to filter a command's output to match the text pattern you're looking for.


The doctest module searches for pieces of text that look like interactivePython sessions, and then executes those sessions to verify that they workexactly as shown. There are several common ways to use doctest:


This section examines in detail how doctest works: which docstrings it looks at,how it finds interactive examples, what execution context it uses, how ithandles exceptions, and how option flags can be used to control its behavior.This is the information that you need to know to write doctest examples; forinformation about actually running doctest on these examples, see the followingsections.


The functions testmod() and testfile() provide a simple interface todoctest that should be sufficient for most basic uses. For a less formalintroduction to these two functions, see sections Simple Usage: Checking Examples in Docstringsand Simple Usage: Checking Examples in a Text File.


Divide the given string into examples and intervening text, and return them asa list of alternating Examples and strings. Line numbers for theExamples are 0-based. The optional argument name is a nameidentifying this string, and is only used for error messages.


Argument s is a string containing doctest examples. The string is convertedto a Python script, where doctest examples in s are converted to regular code,and everything else is converted to Python comments. The generated script isreturned as a string. For example,


Optional argument pm controls whether post-mortem debugging is used. If pmhas a true value, the script file is run directly, and the debugger getsinvolved only if the script terminates via raising an unhandled exception. Ifit does, then post-mortem debugging is invoked, via pdb.post_mortem(),passing the traceback object from the unhandled exception. If pm is notspecified, or is false, the script is run under the debugger from the start, viapassing an appropriate exec() call to pdb.run().


Write text files containing test cases as interactive examples, and test thefiles using testfile() or DocFileSuite(). This is recommended,although is easiest to do for new projects, designed from the start to usedoctest.


Define functions named _regrtest_topic that consist of single docstrings,containing test cases for the named topics. These functions can be included inthe same file as the module, or separated out into a separate test file.


Go through the following steps to install and use the tool: 1. Install the application with the following command in the Terminal:sudo apt install searchmonkey 2. Launch the application. 3. Choose the folder to be searched. 4. Check the "Containing" checkbox, enter your search words and press "Enter." 5. Click on a file from the list on the left pane to see the fragments of text found. 2ff7e9595c


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