grep

Ron Joma ron at attcan.UUCP
Fri Nov 2 01:37:08 AEST 1990


In article <658 at llnl.LLNL.GOV>, rjshaw at ramius.llnl.gov (Robert Shaw) writes:
> Question from Len Teifel:
> |
> | I have a main directory with hundreds of subdirectories, 
> | and I want to find a file with a particular string, say "xyz"
> | The grep command only works in one directory at a time. Is there
> | a way of searching my whole directory structure to find a file
> | with a particular string?
> | 
> try find ~ -name \*xyz\* -print
> 
> Or, not quite as nice: ls -R ~ | grep xyz
> 
I think that Len is looking for a pattern inside of the files, not
in the file names.  To find a  keyword in a file, use the following
pipe:

find path -print | xargs grep "pattern"

The find creates the path names, xargs converts these to arguements,
thus forcing grep to look inside each file being passed along.


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