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up vote 7 down vote favorite

I tried searching for similar command in ncftp (actually this is the only terminal ftp client I used) and I didn't find it.

What's the way (if possible at all) to use grep command on remote server, to search for strings in files?

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3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

The standard ftp protocol does not allow it (You can check the list of commands). So you would have to download everything just to be able to grep on it.

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up vote 3 down vote

You can use curlftpfs to mount remote ftp as local disk and manipulate with files as on your local machine.

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As with everything which is mount based, this implies that you will transfer the whole data to your own host. – Stéphane Gimenez Apr 2 '12 at 12:27
Yes it will. But it also depends on task you need to perform. When you need grep something in the most cases you can ignore nontext files (and they won't be transfer) and maybe part of text files. So in this case your sum transfer size may be lower than in case you'll transfer the whole data from the remote site. – rush Apr 2 '12 at 12:45
up vote 3 down vote

You should localy mount the remote FTP directory to do this, however, be warned that all the files you grep will need to be downloaded for this operation.

SSH into the remote machine and run grep through there, if possible, to save bandwidth.

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