Search For Text In Multiple Files Mac

It’ll search for terms in all the PDF files located in your chosen directory. Performing A PDF Search Using Foxit Reader. Foxit Reader also comes equipped with advanced search capabilities and you can use it to find whatever it is you want in your multiple PDF files.

Search with Spotlight

Click in the upper-right corner of the menu bar, or press Command-Space bar.
Enter what you want to find. You can search for something like “apple store” or “emails from emily”.
To open an item from the results list, double-click the item. Or to quickly look through the results, use the Up Arrow and Down Arrow keys.

Search by file type or location

To search by file type, use the word “kind” and the file type. For example, type “kind:folders” or “kind:audio”.
To show the location of a file on your Mac, choose the file from the results list, then press and hold Command. The file’s location appears at the bottom of the preview. To open the file’s location, press Command-R.
To see all the results from your Mac in the Finder, scroll to the bottom of the results list, then double-click “Show all in Finder.”

Get definitions, calculations, and conversions

Spotlight can show you dictionary definitions, calculations, measurement conversions, and more. Find out more ways to search with Spotlight.

Here are examples of what you can do:

To get a definition, enter a word or phrase, then click the result in the Definition section.
To get a calculation, enter something like “2+2” in the search field.
To convert measurements, enter something like 25 lbs or “32 ft to meters”.

Find movie showtimes, weather, and nearby places

You can use Spotlight to search for movie showtimes, weather, and places near you. Easefab video converter mac torrent windows 7.

Here are examples of what you can do:

To get showtimes, enter the name of the movie that you want to see. To see what's playing near you, enter “showtimes.”
To get local weather information, enter “weather.”
To find restaurants near you, enter something like “places to eat,” then click a result in the Maps section.

Learn more

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac.
Use Search on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

Spotlight features might vary by country or region.

Search for text in multiple Word files via the Terminal 11 comments Create New Account

Click here to return to the 'Search for text in multiple Word files via the Terminal' hint

The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.

Search for text in multiple Word files via the Terminal

Or add this alias to your tcsh aliases:
alias hgrep 'grep !* -Ir .'
use as in
hgrep foo
finds all instances of foo in non-binary files from here down in the hierarchy
In other words, grep supports recursion, so no need for the find
grep 'danny the dog' -li -r .
does the same thing as the hint.

Sorry if I've mentioned this before, but if you use the 'Z' shell (zsh) instead of csh or bash, then you don't need to use the 'find' command, as it has inbuilt recursive filename completion. So you can get the same effect by simply typing
grep -li 'danny the dog' **/*.doc
You can also restrict by file size, type, permissions — everything find can do and more.

zsh has lots of other great features, too — and it's free, open source, and supplied as part of Mac OS X. (I'm surprised it's not more popular.)

---
Andy/

Build effects visually in the powerful Designer. Red giant keying suite torrent download mac. Dissolve your particle objects in fluids or create complex fractal animations.

great! I've been using zsh for years (and fully agree it's a terrific shell), was aware of the '**' feature but it never occured to me that it could be used to replace the rather clumsy find/grep combination. Thanks!
Let me also add that for those who are versed in regular expressions, egrep should be used in place of grep (as far as i understood).

Search for text in multiple Word files via the Terminal

find doesn't operate from the current directory down. The first argument to find is the directory to start from, and '.' is the current directory. There's no need to cd elsewhere, you just change the first argument, eg

Search for text in multiple Word files via the Terminal

Search for text in multiple files mac pro

find doesn't handle spaces well. A command I often execute and have aliased is:

find . -type f -print0 xargs -0 egrep (your pattern here)

The -print0 and the -0 argument to xargs cause the two tools to use zero-bytes to terminate file names instead of newlines, since the shell doesn't discriminate between newlines and other whitespace in many cases. This means it will handle folders and files with spaces, tabs and other strange characters in their name.

Search for text in multiple Word files via the Terminal

In response to the parenthetical comment, you don't need Tiger to do this now. You just need to open up the 'Find' window in the Finder, select your home directory as the target of the search (likely already available in your selected places list), add 'doc' to the extension criterion, then add the words in the content criterion. Nowhere near as fast as Tiger promises, but the find dialog window is largely keyboard-navigable, so you can save yourself a trip to Terminal.

grep -r reads every file looking for the string, even in non .doc files > very slow !
As for the finder, it is enable to search inside word documents (at least for the moment, didn't know it was a tiger feature).

Search for text in multiple Word files via the Terminal

Once you find what you're looking for you might then want to change the sought after text to something else. Say all instances of 'dog' to 'cat' as one example..
find . -type f -name '*.doc' xargs -n1 perl -p -i -e 's/dog/cat/g'
the perl code will edit in place and make a backup of the original file being edited at the time. All instances of 'dog' will now be 'cat'. Very handy..

It is faster to use find(1) with xargs(1), but then the syntax is a little more complicated. Here is a script that reduces the syntax to a bare minimum for the most common usage - i.e., finding files containing strings. To use it, copy the text below and save it (e.g., with TextEdit) to a file named `pat' in your current path (.e.g., /usr/bin/pat or preferably someplace like /opt/bin/pat, if that's in your path). Examples of how the command is used are contained in the comments of the script itself. Don't forget to make the script executable, e.g., with the command line: ---- CUT HERE ----

Thanks so much! I was looking for a 'UNIX' way to do this for some time.

Search for text in multiple Word files via the Terminal

This is very helpful. Too bad that you can't do it in finder or, better yet, in word 2004