The wild card actually substitutes with the name of all the files and directories in the current directory. To search for the word 'simple' in all the files of the current directories, just use wild card (*). Except empty.txt, all files contain the term 'simple' on which I'll perform the grep search. Here's the directory structure I am going to use in this example. Let me show you all this in details with proper examples so that it is easier for you to understand. You may also specify the directory path if you are not in the directory where you want to perform the search: grep -r search_term directory_path You can make grep search in all the files and all the subdirectories of the current directory using the -r recursive search option: grep -r search_term. It only searches in all the files in the current directory. If you want to search all the files in a directory with grep, use it like this: grep search_term * Usually, you run grep on a single file like this: grep search_term filename Dropping Nanoseconds and replacing > with >= or -newer with ! -older (if your find implementation supports it which is unlikely) may be a better approach.Grep is an excellent tool when you have to search on the content of a file. You can even find that modification time is set upon modification to some value that predates the initial call to date or reference to $EPOCHREALTIME so those approaches may not work for commands that take less than a centisecond to run. Stat -F %s.%N -A2 +mtime - $REPLY & (( $2 > $1 )) '])īeware though that on Linux at least, even though the system and filesystems support nanosecond precision, granularity is much less. With zsh, you can replace the before=$(date with print -Pv before or or (after zmodload zsh/datetime) you could again avoid the call to find by using glob qualifiers, and even the temporary variable by using an anonymous function again, but that becomes significantly involved: zmodload zsh/stat maxdepth 1 -name 'error_*.txt' -type f -size +0c -newermt '$before' With the GNU implementation of date and find (that's also the find implementation that introduced the -maxdepth predicate), you can avoid having to create that. ) doesn't match the other criteria (it matches neither -name 'error_*.txt' nor -type f) anyway. prune with -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 though -maxdepth 1 would also work here as the file at depth 0 (. With some find implementations, you can replace ! -name. In zsh, you can replace the find command with: print -rC1 - error_*.txt(N-.L+0e]']) prune -name 'error_*.txt' -type f -size +0c -newer. To list error files that have been modified since you ran a command, you can use the -newer predicate of find and compare with a file that have been touched just before running your command: touch.

That one you can extend to only print the user name (the part of the root name of the file after the first _) with: error_*.txt(N-.L+0:r) prefix and of working even if the user name cannot be decoded as text in the locale and of giving you a (lexically by default) sorted list. That has the benefit of not including the. is the equivalent of -type f and L+0 of -size +0c (and N for Nullglob so as not to report an error if there's no matching file). Where - acts like -L so that for symlinks, the size and type of their targets be considered. Or with the zsh shell: print -rC1 - error_*.txt(N-.L+0) Which also has the benefit of ignoring files that are not of type regular (such as directories, sockets.) prune -name 'error_*.txt' -type f -size +0c Beware for files encoded in a charmap other than that of the locale, it could fail to match non-empty lines if their contents cannot be decoded as text.Īlso note that not all grep implementations will report files with only one unterminated line (one missing the line delimiter like in the output of printf invalid-text-as-missing-the-last-newline).Īnother approach is to look for files that contain at least one byte: find -L. Where ^ is a regular expression that matches at the start of the subject, subject being each line in the file for grep.įor those with at least one non-empty text line: grep -l. To list the files named error_anything.txt in the current working directory that contain at least one line, in the language of bash and most other Unix shells, you can do: grep -l '^' error_*.txt Like most applications it can work with its input/output connected to a terminal device or any other type of file.

Note that bash is not a terminal, it's one of many shells, which are interpreters for some kinds of programming languages specialised in running commands.

Bash grep all files in directory