Question

I have a folder with 200 files in it. We can say that the files are named “abc0” to “abc199”. Five of these files contain the string “ez123” but I don’t know which ones. My current attempt to find the file names of the files that contain the string is:

#!/bin/sh
while read FILES
do
cat $FILES | egrep "ez123"
done

I have a file that contains the filenames of all files in the directory. So I then execute:

./script < filenames

This is verifies for me that the files containing the string exist but I still don’t have the name of the files. Are there any ideas concerning the best way to accomplish this?

Thanks

Answer 1

find /directory -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec fgrep -l 'ez123' \{\} \; 

(-maxdepth 1 is only necessary if you only want to search the directory and not the tree recursively (if there’s any)).

fgrep is a bit faster than grep. -l lists the matched filenames only.