How to show filenames only after a keyword grep search

grep

I currently have n data files in a directory where each file has at most 1 line of very long data. My directory structure is

director/
    data1.json
    data2.json
    data3.json

I know that at least one of those files contain the keyword I'm looking for, but since the one line of data is too long, it covers my entire terminal. How do I get the filename only after performing a keyword grep? The grep command I'm using is:

grep keyword *.json

Best Answer

The -l argument should do what you want.

   -l, --files-with-matches
          Suppress  normal  output;  instead  print the name of each input
          file from which output would normally have  been  printed.   The
          scanning  will  stop  on  the  first match.  (-l is specified by
          POSIX.)

Related Solutions

Recursive Text Search with Grep and File Patterns

My version of GNU Grep has a switch for this:

grep -R --include='*.txt' $Pattern

Described as follows:

--include=GLOB
Search only files whose base name matches GLOB (using wildcard matching as described under --exclude).

How to make (non-gnu-)grep ignore binary files

Building on the previous answer, you can use the "file" command to identify text files, and then limit your grep to only those files. For example:

  find dir -type f -print |
    xargs file |
    grep text |
    cut -f1 -d: |
    xargs grep "expression"

That's:

Find all files in directory "dir"
Pass these as arguments to "file"
Look for output from "file" containing the word "text"
Chop out the first colon-delimited field and use it as a filename
Search these files using grep.

This will fail in the case of filenames containing whitespace or colons, but will otherwise do what you want.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Recursive Text Search with Grep and File Patterns

How to make (non-gnu-)grep ignore binary files

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