Daily Archives: 11 October 2022

Using a CSV input file, find all documents that contain any of the items in a cell of a column

 in Bash / GNU/Linux  tagged bash / cut / exec / find / full text search / GNU/Linux / line / read by

The following code will use as input one column from a CSV file, and for each element in the column, it will perform a full-text search in a folder to find all files that contain that element.

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#!/bin/bash
 
#Execution parameters
# 1 - the folder to look in for the element
# 2 - the input file that contains the search terms
# 3 - the column of interest
# 4 - the delimiter to use to find the column
# e.g. ./searchEachElement.sh ./2\ Print/ book.csv 5 ','
 
folder="$1";
input="$2";
column="$3";
delimiter="$4"
 
while read -r line; do
  needle=`echo $line | cut -d "$delimiter" -f "$column"`;
  echo ">>> $needle"
  find "$folder" -type f -exec grep "$needle" -s -l '{}' \;
done < "$input";

More information on the full-text search can be found here.