- Search All Files For Text Cmd
- Search All Files For Text Macbeth
- Mac Search File Content
- Search All Files For A String
The next examples come from plain-text files, for which grep can display the results. You see the file name, followed by a match of the search string in its context. Search for string recursively in all files and folders Written by Guillermo Garron Date: 2013-02-12 18:59:13 00:00. Today I was moving all my static assets from static2 to static3 server, and after the change I needed to find if there still was an occurence of static2 string.
Convert table to text in word. • On the Layout tab (next to the Table Design tab), click Convert to Text. • In the Convert to Text box, under Separate text with, click the separator character you want to use in place of the column boundaries.
It's fast, it's powerful, and its very name suggests that it does something technical: grep. With this workhorse of the command line, you can quickly find text hidden in your files. Understanding grep is the first step in joining the guild of command-line wizards.
If all you’re looking for is a small utility that’s fast and can search inside files, PDF or not, check out FileHound (here’s the portable version). I haven’t tried searching within scanned PDF files, but if anyone has, please share your experience in the comments. You can learn more about general Spotlight search operators for OS X here, or read a few more specific use cases, like locating large files on the Mac with size searches, or finding files from a specific date with another operator set, or even searching system files in Mac OS X. VS Code allows you to quickly search over all files in the currently-opened folder. Press Ctrl+Shift+F and enter in your search term. Search results are grouped into files containing the search term, with an indication of the hits in each file and its location. Expand a file to see a preview of all of the hits within that file. If you click something common from the list, like doc, then you’ll notice that the file is indexed with the Index Properties and File Contents option. This means that Windows search will look inside these types of files when you input your search query.
Why Not Use the Finder?
It's easy to find files with the Finder when you know their names. But the grep command is a time-saver when you're trying to find what's inside files. You can use grep easily from the command line to search for specific text, and you'll get results in seconds. (You can also use grep within certain text editors.)
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.
The Finder also lacks grep's flexibility: while it's good for searching for a specific word (for example, Walden ), it becomes less useful when you want to find a longer string. Search for Walden Pond, and it returns all files that contain either Walden or Pond.
Using grep also gives you access to regular expressions. These combinations of letters, numbers, wild cards, and other special characters let you find much more than mere words. You can search for just about any string of characters: IP addresses in log files; phone numbers in contact lists; or specific strings containing a series of numbers, letters, or other characters. Using regular expressions, you're limited only by your imagination.
Get a Grip on Grep
The grep command looks inside one or several files for the string, or text, you specify. Its syntax is:
grep options search_string file..
.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:And so on. You can use the familiar asterisk (
*
) wild card to have grep search a group of files in the current working directory, as in grep Walden *
. This command searches all the files in the current directory for the word Walden, returning the following:And so on. As the above example shows, the search returns several matches. The first, Walden.doc, is a Word file. The grep command calls such proprietary file types binary files. It can't display the contents of binary files, but it can search inside them and tell you if something matches. The next examples come from plain-text files, for which grep can display the results. You see the file name, followed by a match of the search string in its context.
You can search for any multiword text string by enclosing the string in single quotes. For example, if you want to search for the phrase Walden Pond,you'd type
grep 'Walden Pond' *
.Note that grep doesn't like Macintosh line breaks. It returns lines containing the search string, but it doesn't see Mac line breaks as anything other than characters. Text to voice for mac. In such a case, the “line” it returns is the entire file; this can dump a lot of text into your Terminal window.
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/*
.Fine-Tune Your Searches
To Find… | Use This Option | Example |
---|---|---|
Text in subfolders | -r | grep -r Walden ~/Documents/* Finds Walden in any file in any subfolder of ~/Documents. |
Whole words only | -w | grep -w live Finds only live ; does not find liver , lives , lived , and so on. |
Case-insensitive text | -i | grep -i pond Finds pond , POND , or Pond . |
File names only | -l | grep -l Walden Finds files containing Walden , but returns only a list of file names. |
Number of occurrences only | -c | grep -c Walden Returns the names of files containing Walden and the number of hits in each file. |
The grep command has several options that let you fine-tune the way you search for text, as well as the kind of results grep returns. Get started with the helpful options listed here. (Note that you can also combine options—for instance,
grep -rl Walden
searches subfolders and returns only a list of files containing the word Walden .)Search for Multiple Strings
Using the pipe (
|
), a Unix redirection operator, you can tell grep to search for more than one string. Say you want to find files containing both Walden and Pondon the same line. You'd use this command: grep Walden * | grep Pond
. The first part of the command looks for the word Walden in any files in the current directory, and the second runs another grep command on the results of the first command. Terminal displays only the final results of the two commands combined.You could string together many grep commands, like this:
. 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.
This function of grep is most useful when you're searching for specific strings in output from other commands. In this way you can whittle down long and complex output. For example, here's a common way to find the process ID of a program that's stuck so you can force-quit it from the command line: type
ps -ax | grep Finder
.This command first gets a list of all processes running on your Mac, and then sifts through this list looking for lines containing the word Finder. For example, your results might be as follows:
The process ID is the first number on each line; here, the Finder is 390. (You'll notice the command also returns itself; since the word Finderis in the grep command, that gets listed as well.) So if the Finder is stuck, this gives you the information you need to force-quit it. Now you would type the command (where the process ID is the final argument)
kill -9 390
.Add Regular Expressions to the Mix
While you have seen some of the power of the grep command, you can go much further using regular expressions, special combinations of characters that act as wild cards. Here are a few examples.
If you're not sure how to spell the word separate, for example (is that an a or an e?), run this command to check the special dictionary file hidden in your Mac's entrails:
You'll get back a list of words that includes separate, separately, separately, separateness, and separates.
Note the two special characters in the command: the caret (
^
) and the dot (.
). The caret tells grep to search for the string at the beginning of a line, so the results don't include words like inseparate. The dot matches any character except a new line.What if you want to find all the phone numbers in a specific file? Try this command, which will find phone numbers in the 555-1234 format:
.
Each of the
[0-9]
wild cards matches any character in the range specified in brackets. You can use ranges such as[1-3]
to limit your search to specific strings. This works for letters, too:[a-n]
matches any lowercase character from a to n.You can build your own range with sets of characters—for example, [aeiou]
will match only vowels. You can learn more about regular expressions by typingman grep
in Terminal, or by consulting Jeffrey Friedl's excellent book Mastering Regular Expressions, second edition (O'Reilly, 2002). With a bit of practice, you'll be using grep and regular expressions to find anything you want.Kirk McElhearn is the author of The Mac OS X Command Line: Unix Under the Hood (Sybex, 2004). His blog, Kirkville, has articles and tips on using the command line with Mac OS X. ]
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Search with Spotlight
- Click in the upper-right corner of the menu bar, or press Command-Space bar.
- Enter what you want to find. You can search for something like “apple store” or “emails from emily”.
- To open an item from the results list, double-click the item. Or to quickly look through the results, use the Up Arrow and Down Arrow keys.
Search by file type or location
- To search by file type, use the word “kind” and the file type. For example, type “kind:folders” or “kind:audio”.
- To show the location of a file on your Mac, choose the file from the results list, then press and hold Command. The file’s location appears at the bottom of the preview. To open the file’s location, press Command-R.
- To see all the results from your Mac in the Finder, scroll to the bottom of the results list, then double-click “Show all in Finder.”
Get definitions, calculations, and conversions
Spotlight can show you dictionary definitions, calculations, measurement conversions, and more. Find out more ways to search with Spotlight.
Here are examples of what you can do:
- To get a definition, enter a word or phrase, then click the result in the Definition section.
- To get a calculation, enter something like “2+2” in the search field.
- To convert measurements, enter something like 25 lbs or “32 ft to meters”.
Find movie showtimes, weather, and nearby places
You can use Spotlight to search for movie showtimes, weather, and places near you.
Here are examples of what you can do:
Search All Files For Text Cmd
- To get showtimes, enter the name of the movie that you want to see. To see what's playing near you, enter “showtimes.”
- To get local weather information, enter “weather.”
- To find restaurants near you, enter something like “places to eat,” then click a result in the Maps section.
Search All Files For Text Macbeth
Learn more
Mac Search File Content
- Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac.
- Use Search on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
Search All Files For A String
Spotlight features might vary by country or region.