grep all .java files in a directory for a particular string

Question

How would I search all .java files for a simple string (not a regex) in the current directory and all sub-directories on Mac OS X? I just want to print a list of file and directory names that match.

Answer 1

And the always popular

find . -name '*.java' | xargs grep -l 'string'

EDIT (by Frank Szczerba):

If you are dealing with filenames or directories that have spaces in them, the safest way to do this is:

find . -name '*.java' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -l 'string'

There's always more than one way to do it.

Answer 2

The traditional UNIX answer would be the one that was accepted for this question:

find . -name '*.java' | xargs grep -l 'string'

This will probably work for Java files, but spaces in filenames are a lot more common on Mac than in the traditional UNIX world. When filenames with spaces are passed through the pipeline above, xargs will interpret the individual words as different names.

What you really want is to nul-separate the names to make the boundaries unambiguous:

find . -name '*.java' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -l 'string'

The alternative is to let find run grep for you, as Mark suggests, though that approach is slower if you are searching large numbers of files (as grep is invoked once per file rather than once with the whole list of files).

Answer 3

Use the grep that is better than grep, ack:

ack -l --java  "string" 

Answer 4

This will actually use a regex if you want, just stay away from the metacharacters, or escape them, and you can search for strings.

find . -iname "*.java" -exec egrep -il "search string" {} \;

Answer 5

grep -rl --include="*.java" simplestring *

Answer 6

Since this is an OSX question, here is a more OSX specific answer.

Skip find and use Spotlight from the command line. Much more powerful!

COMMAND LINE SPOTLIGHT – FIND MEETS GREP

Most people don’t know you can do Spotlight searches from the command line. Why remember all the arcane find and grep options and what not when you can let Spotlight do the work for you. The command line interface to Spotlight is called mdfind. It has all the same power as the GUI Spotlight search and more because it is scriptable at the command line!

Answer 7

Give this a go:

grep -rl "string" */*java

Answer 8

You could also use a GUI program like TextWrangler to do a more intuitive search where the options are in the interface.

Answer 9

grep "(your string)" -rl $(find ./ -name "*.java")

If you want to ignore case, replace -rl with -irl. (your string) may also be a regex if you ever see the need.