Search Files with Regular Expressions

Question

Is there a way to search files for matches to a regular expression?

I would like to search all files of a specific extension for matches to this expression: ^ := '([a-z0-9]{3})'$

I would also like it to return (or even better jump to) the line(s) that match.

Answer 1

Agent Ransack will do it.

Answer 2

Also look in to AstroGrep, great little program for going just this.

Answer 3

I think you'd want to do something like this:

find / -name *EXTENSION -exec grep "^ := '([a-z0-9]{3})'$" {} \;

It searches the whole drive (/) for any files ending in EXTENSION and then runs grep with your pattern on that file. You can insert any grep flags in there to get more specific behavior, but by default it prints out the file name with its matching line.

As Dan suggests, you can further combine this with sed to actually manipulate the matching files.

Answer 4

Fastest search tool you will ever see is Everything It does not make index, instead it directly access the NTFS records and find your file without even looking and iterating through your hard drive

It supports regular expression

It is my everytime search tool, it shows the result while you are typing, what can be more faster than that?

Answer 5

sed("stream editor") will do it. They have Sed for windows as well as for linux (it should be in your package manager if it isn't already in the default install.