Finding files containing 'string'

[John Summerfied]

Daniel Vogel wrote:
> 
Give Les the prize:-)

> 
>> > I had two suggestions:
>> > 1. gnome-search-tool
>> > 2. find ./ -name "*" -exec grep "string" {} /dev/null \;
>> >
>> > Someone suggested even a better command solution than 2. above but I
>> > can't remember what it is.
>> > --
>>
>> find . -type f -print0 |xargs -0 grep "string"

This selects only files (not symlinks), and copes well wifh path names 
containing spaces and other difficult characters.

Here are two small improvements:
find . -type f -print0 |xargs -0 --no-run-if-empty grep -H "string"

Otherwise, xargs may run grep with no filename args, and if grep has one 
filename arg it won't list the file name (the point of using /dev/null 
in some other examples).

Use of xargs reduces the number of times grep is loaded and run, 
sometimes an important matter.

>>
>> should work.
>>
> 
> ..err...my sugestion is much simple...
> 
> grep -e <string> <files>
> 
> the for example:
> grep -e Daniel *.html

This doesn't descend subdirectories (the point of using -r).

Aa compatibility note. Probably not important to all, but I think 
recursion is fairly new (say. more recent than RHL 5.x or 6.x) - I don't 
remember seeing it before and I did look for it, and I'm sure I've asked 
about it. There may be other greps out there that don't support 
recursion (or -H for that matter).



> 


-- 

Cheers
John

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