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I searched everywhere but didn't find out how to return a file content that matches given words or a regex.

cat /tmp/*.txt | grep "strings"
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up vote 4 down vote accepted

Did you just mean to grep the file(s) instead of (uselessly) cating it/them to grep?

grep strings /tmp/*.txt

What cat does is that it combines all *.txt files into one big "file". If you cat multiple files, grep therefore will only see one input without a real name—it's all your files combined, fed through the pipe. This won't get you the file names, since you basically made everything one big file.

If you only want grep to return the files that match, use the -l option:

grep -l strings /tmp/*.txt
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thanks, my english is a little bit approximative. –  bobby6 Apr 30 '13 at 14:49
If you want to search for string_s_ (more than one), separate them either by \| (without the -E option) or by | (with the -E option), that is grep 'foo\|bar' or grep -E 'foo|bar'. –  Uwe Apr 30 '13 at 15:03
ack is an alternative tool that is great for this sort of thing –  Ciclamino Apr 30 '13 at 17:24
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