Linux Command – How to Find Strings in Binary or Non-ASCII File

Use screen, a free terminal multiplexer developed by the GNU Project that will allow you to have several terminals in one.

You can start a session and your terminals will be saved even when you connection is lost, so you can resume later or from home.

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.