recursive grep

[David Elliott]

In article <13710 at polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> steve at polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Steve DeJarnett) writes:
>In article <122979 at sun.Eng.Sun.COM> williamt at sun.UUCP (William A. Turnbow) writes:
>>Here is a short quicky (I hope).  I am trying to do the following:
>>
>>find . -type d -exec grep string {}/* \;
>
>	If you're trying to grep for a string in every file in or below the
>current directory, why not do this:
>
>	find . -type f -exec grep string {} \;

A closer solution is

	find . -type f -exec grep string {} /dev/null \;

This will force grep to print the filename.  Even better is

	find . -type f -print | xargs grep string /dev/null

if you have xargs.  xargs will run

	grep string /dev/null {filenames}

for sets of file names read from stdin.  The result is far fewer
forks and execs of grep, so you get the results much quicker.

>	I suspect that find "sees" the /* after the braces, and presumes
>that you mustn't really want it to expand the filename there.  I've never
>known find to need a space between the braces, but, then, that certainly
>doesn't mean that it never would expect that.  :-)

Actually, find just looks specifically for {} as an argument.  I've
always thought find should expand {} in any part of an argument, but
that's probably because I wanted it to do that when I first started
using it.

-- 
David Elliott		dce at Solbourne.COM
			...!{uunet,boulder,nbires,sun}!stan!dce

"I had a dream that my kids had been reparented." - Tom LaStrange