Question

I am interested into getting into bash scripting and would like to know how you can traverse a unix directory and log the path to the file you are currently looking at if it matches a regex criteria.

It would go like this:

• Traverse a large unix directory path file/folder structure.
• If the current file’s contents contained a string that matched one or more regex expressions,
• Then append the file’s full path to a results text file.

Bash or Perl scripts are fine, although I would prefer how you would do this using a bash script with grep, awk, etc commands.

Answer 1

use find and grep

find . -exec grep -l -e 'myregex' {} \; >> outfile.txt

-l on the grep gets just the file name

-e on the grep specifies a regex

{} places each file found by the find command on the end of the grep command

>> outfile.txt appends to the text file