Grep recursively through subdirectories

Hans-Henry Jakobsen — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 13:54:16 +0000

grep recursively through subdirectories for files that match a specific pattern:

grep -l -r –include=*.doc regex *

The equivalent command unsing find:

find . -name ‘*.doc’ -exec grep -l regex \{\} \;

The option after grep is the lowercase letter L, not the number 1).
Remove the -l to see the actual matches instead of the file names.

regex –make option

Hans-Henry Jakobsen — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 22:02:53 +0000

Get a ready regex

The –make option is described by its author as “a remedy for headaches.” It outputs a regexp for one of several common patterns that are given as arguments, as listed in table.

List of ready regexps available in txt2regex

Argument	Description
date	This argument matches dates in mm/dd/yyyy format, from 00/00/0000 to 99/99/9999.
date2	This argument matches dates in mm/dd/yyyy format, from 00/00/1000 to 19/39/2999.
date3	This argument matches dates in mm/dd/yyyy format, from 00/00/1000 to 12/31/2999.
hour	This argument matches time in hh:mm format, from 00:00 to 99:99.
hour2	This argument matches time in hh:mm format, from 00:00 to 29:59.
hour3	This argument matches time in hh:mm format, from 00:00 to 23:59.
number	This argument matches any positive or negative integer.
number2	This argument matches any positive or negative integer with an optional floating-point value.
number3	This argument matches any positive or negative integer with optional commas and an optional floating-point value.

For example, you can use this to get a ready regexp for any valid hour in military time, as shown in listing.

Listing. Getting a date regexp with txt2regex

$ txt2regex --make hour3
RegEx perl    : ([01][0-9]|2[0123]):[012345][0-9]
RegEx php     : ([01][0-9]|2[0123]):[012345][0-9]
RegEx postgres: ([01][0-9]|2[0123]):[012345][0-9]
RegEx python  : ([01][0-9]|2[0123]):[012345][0-9]
RegEx sed     : ([01][0-9]|2[0123]):[012345][0-9]
RegEx vim     : ([01][0-9]|2[0123]):[012345][0-9]

$

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Grep recursively through subdirectories

regex –make option