How to grep only show path/filename?

Question

I'm trying to locate the files which contain certain pattern, so I use grep -ir 'pattern' . to search all files under current directory. But I don't want to see the content of each file, I only need the path/filename. How can I do that?

Ps: Because some JSON file contains very long text in one line, then it will occupy the whole screen. I don't want to filter out those JSON files, because that's what I'm trying to locate

score 20 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 01 '14 at 21:44

20

grep -l will output JUST the names of files which matched, without showing the actual match.

answered Dec 01 '14 at 21:44

Marc B

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Yeah, and I actually want to know how many matches in each particular file. – CodTango Dec 01 '14 at 21:48
why not sudo grep -i -r "text to search" /dir – unixmiah Dec 01 '14 at 21:48
ahhhh - check this post, http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/65181/list-the-files-containing-a-particular-word-in-their-text – unixmiah Dec 01 '14 at 21:49
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there's `grep -c` for that. but you'd have to test that with -l, since -l is a posix spec and terminates the search in any file upon the first match. – Marc B Dec 01 '14 at 21:51
@MarcB I tried, you don't need -l. grep -c will only show the path with count number. – CodTango Dec 01 '14 at 22:24

How to grep only show path/filename?

1 Answers1