I am needing some help on a script to find a phrase in a file and to take the file name that it finds and move that file to another directory. THanks jrmontg

finds and moves the file to the /tmp directory: #!/bin/bash find . -type f -name "mytest.file" -print|while read str do mv "$str" /tmp done

Sorry, but I misread your question. This finds all files with the txt extension, searches for the string "my text" and moves the files to the /tmp directory: #!/bin/bash find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec grep -l "my text" {} \; -print | while read s tr do mv "$str" /tmp done

I did get a error. tr: two strings must be given when translating Suppose I want to just seach /home for the word "test" in any file? Thanks jrmontg

Sorry, again, but, my cut and paste inadvertly inserted a CR. Note the variable str was wrongly split. This should fix it: #!/bin/bash find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec grep -l "my text" {} \; -print | while read str do mv "$str" /tmp done The . means search the current directory. You can do something like this to search every file: # untested find /home -type f -exec grep "test" {} \; -print | while read str do mv "$str" /tmp done # end script The problem is that if any of your files happen to be binary, you could have a problem grepping them depending on the OS. There is a way of eliminating binary files, but it takes more options to the find command. Do you know if you are searching binary files?