What is the difference between grep and find commands unix

First Prev Next Last. Showing Answers 1 - 17 of 17 Answers. Grep is used to find strings in a file. GREP is for finding out the string pattern inside a file FIND is an utility for searching file and folders based on size, access time, modification time. Vidhya Jul 21st, Rajesh Jul 22nd, Nandana Mar 9th, SK Apr 16th, Subrata Chakrabortty Mar 9th, Parth Gandhi Dec 6th, Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

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If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again. Skip to content I have heard people asking what is the difference between grep and find multiple times in the last few years.

What is the difference between the grep and find commands? Some examples are: Modification time Size Permissions Type e. In this section we have seen how… The find command allows to find files and directories in the Linux filesystem based on a search criteria provided by the user.

Makes sense? But, I was thinking… …how can I use them together? How could I use the grep command to replace it? The grep is a command line utility for searching plain text data sets for lines matching a regular expression. The find is a command line utility that searches one or more directory trees of a file system and locates files based on the user-specified criteria. This is the main difference between grep and find command in UNIX.

A grep command helps to scan documents and to represent the result according to a specified format whereas a find command helps to search and locate files in the system. The difference between grep and find command in UNIX is that the grep is a command that helps to search content and display them according to the user-specified regular expression while the find command helps to search and locate files according to the given criteria.

Find centralized, trusted content and collaborate around the technologies you use most. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. FIND is an command for searching file s and folder s using filters such as size , access time , modification time. The find command lists all of the files within a directory and its sub-directories that match a set of filters.

This command is most commonly used to find all of the files that have a certain name. To find all of the files named theFile. To look in your current directory and its sub-directories for all of the files that end in the extension. Grep searches for lines containing a specified pattern and, by default, writes them to the standard output.

In your first example, you are using the find utility to list the filenames of regular files where the filename includes the string txt. In your second example, you are using the find utility to list the filenames of regular files and feeding the resultant filenames via a pipe to the grep utility which searches the contents of each file for the string txt.

Each time the string is found, the corresponding line of the file is outputted. When you have a path with txt in the directory name, the second command will find a match. The first command will display files having txt in their name.