Linux – How to search for text in a PuTTY console window

consolelinuxputty

Is there a easy way for me to:

  • search for a string in the output window of the putty ?
  • or even a Linux command to search and highlight a string in the output ?

I have 20,000+ lines in the output and sometimes I have to search for customer_id : 1111 and currently I have to copy them to word or notepad and then search.

Is there a better way to do this ?

Best Answer

If you don't care about the rest of the output, then

yourcommand | grep "some regular expression"

will only print the lines that contain "some regular expression".

yourcommand | less

will send the output of your command to the less command which lets you scroll up and down the output. You can search by typing /some regular expression and pressing enter. q will close the program.

If you do want to save the file, then

yourcommand > outputfile

will send the output to a file instead of the screen, which you can open in an editor and search instead of displaying it on the screen. If it exists, outputfile will be erased before yourcommand runs. You can add the output to the end of an existing file if you use >> instead.

The tee program lets you save the output to a file and send it to another program at the same time:

yourcommand | tee outputfile | somethingelse

This will save the original output to outputfile and pass it to some other command.

Related Topic