A large number of .ppt (Powerpoint) files are available to the command line in various directories of a USB drive. The goal is to find the .ppt file with a case sensitive phrase:
Phrase: 'Return on investment'
It would be preferable if the search mechanism where recursive. Bonus-round for explanations that with an explanation the trapping mechanism and build-out to recursively searching the disk. Thank you
UPDATE
Success thanks to Steeldriver for pointing to helpful search mechanism:
grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
-ror-Ris recursive,-nis line number, and-wstands for match the whole word.-l(lower-case L) can be added to just give the file name of matching files.
Along with these, --exclude, --include, --exclude-dir or --include-dir flags could be used for efficient searching:
This will only search through those files which have .c or .h extensions:
grep --include=\*.{c,h} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"This will exclude searching all the files ending with .o extension:
grep --exclude=*.o -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
- Just like exclude files, it's possible to exclude/include directories through
--exclude-dirand--include-dirparameter. For example, this will exclude the dirs dir1/, dir2/ and all of them matching *.dst/:
grep --exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,*.dst} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
This works very well for me, to achieve almost the same purpose like yours.
For more options check man grep.
