Assuming I want to write a line which prints out lines which match a specific string without repeating duplicate lines .. I want to search for this string in the files of the current directory:
grep mystring ***What to put here?** | sort | uniq
How can I search in all of the current dir files?
find . ! -name . -prune -type f -exec cat {} + | grep mystring | LC_ALL=C sort -u Or:
find . ! -name . -prune -type f -exec cat {} + | awk ' /mystring/ && !seen[$0]++' With GNU grep:
LC_ALL=C grep -hr --exclude-dir='?*' mystring | LC_ALL=C sort -u Or with zsh and GNU grep:
grep -h mystring ./*(D.) | LC_ALL=C sort -u To also search in files in sub-directories, recursively:
find . -type f -exec cat {} + | grep mystring | LC_ALL=C sort -u Or:
find . -type f -exec cat {} + | awk ' /mystring/ && !seen[$0]++' With GNU grep:
grep -hr mystring | LC_ALL=C sort -u Note that all those solutions also look inside hidden files (and files inside hidden directories), but not in non-regular files and wouldn't follow symlinks (unless you use some old version of GNU grep with -r).
grep mystring * | sort | uniq ? Doesn't this search in all the current dir files? -. That could fail if you have a large number of non-hidden files in the current directory. If there's more than one file, that would include the file names in the output (GNU grep has a -h option to remove them).