recursive grep

[Gregory Gulik]

In article <3478 at yunexus.UUCP> oz at yunexus.UUCP (Ozan Yigit) writes:
>In article <7774 at cbmvax.UUCP> grr at cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins) writes:
>
>>Iff your system happens to have xargs - many Berkeley derived systems don't,
>>in which case the "find | filter | sh" can stil handle the problem.
>
>Well, everyone has a zippy solution, but it seems, backquotes are either
>out of fashion, too simple, or because of broken shells, ("Arguments too
>long" ?? Nooo... really ??) nobody suggested something like
>
>	egrep ptui `find whatever -print`
>
>Hmm. I thought I had it all this time. :-)
>
>oz

Well, it seems it SHOULD work, but not quite.  If the directory
you are looking through is rather large, you'll get an error from
the shell.  I tried a command similar to the above and ksh gave
me this:

ksh: /usr/bin/egrep: arg list too long

I assume other shells have similar limitations.

That why there is an xargs command.  I don't have access to a BSD
machine so I can't speak about csh.  Maybe csh can handle it better
so it doesn't need xargs???

-greg


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