Question 37884 in Ubuntu Question posted in
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Exclude filename and only search text in grep – Ubuntu

I would like to search for the term "Liszt" within the contents of all text files except their file name. So if there was a file called Liszt Mazeppa.txt it should not be matched as the term "Liszt" is in the file name.

Conversely if there were a file called "Masur LGO.txt" whose contents were Beethoven 3; Liszt Orpheus this should be matched.

I would not use find as from how I understand it find is used for searching for file names.

I tried:
grep -TiPr --include="*.txt" "Liszt" > ./ matches.txt

Unfortunately this still matches text files which have the word Liszt in them.

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2

Answers


  1. 0

    Assuming you want the filenames of the files containing the word Liszt

    find . -type f ! -name '*Liszt*' -exec grep -lw Liszt {} ;

    edit

    Your rewritten question does not add much.
    If you really don’t care about the filenames you can remove the -name condition from the previous find.

    Consider what you want when a file whose name contains Liszt also has Liszt in its content.

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  2. 0

    Regarding I would not use find as from how I understand it find is used for searching for file names. – your use of GNU grep‘s messy options to both find files and search within files is confusing you.

    Don’t use grep to find files, there’s a perfectly good tool to find files with a very obvious name, find. The GNU guys really messed up when they gave GNU grep -r and all those other options for finding files thereby giving people the possibility of making grep commands unnecessarily convoluted.

    Finding files and searching within files are 2 conceptually separate things so use find to find files and then grep to g/re/p (Globally match a Regular Expression and Print the result) within files.

    find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec grep -HTi 'Liszt' {} +

    I’m just guessing at the grep options you’ll want from reading your existing code since you didn’t provide any expected output.

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