[ACCEPTED]-how to find files containing a string using egrep-grep

Accepted answer

Score: 16

Here you are sending the file names (output 12 of the find command) as input to egrep; you actually 11 want to run egrep on the contents of the 10 files.

Here are a couple of alternatives:

find . -name "*.txt" -exec egrep mystring {} \;

or 9 even better

find . -name "*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 egrep mystring

Check the find command help to check what the 8 single arguments do.
The first approach 7 will spawn a new process for every file, while 6 the second will pass more than one file 5 as argument to egrep; the -print0 and -0 4 flags are needed to deal with potentially 3 nasty file names (allowing to separate file 2 names correctly even if a file name contains 1 a space, for example).

Score: 3

try:

find . -name '*.txt' | xargs egrep mystring

There are two problems with your version:

Firstly, *.txt will 7 first be expanded by the shell, giving you 6 a listing of files in the current directory 5 which end in .txt, so for instance, if you have 4 the following:

[dsm@localhost:~]$ ls *.txt
test.txt
[dsm@localhost:~]$

your find command will turn into 3 find . -name test.txt. Just try the following to illustrate:

[dsm@localhost:~]$ echo find . -name *.txt
find . -name test.txt
[dsm@localhost:~]$

Secondly, egrep does 2 not take filenames from STDIN. To convert them 1 to arguments you need to use xargs

Score: 1

find . -name *.txt | egrep mystring

That will not work as egrep will be searching 3 for mystring within the output generated by find . -name *.txt which 2 are just the path to *.txt files.

Instead, you 1 can use xargs:

find . -name *.txt | xargs egrep mystring

Score: 1

You could use

find . -iname *.txt -exec egrep mystring \{\} \;

Score: 1

Here's an example that will return the file 2 paths of a all *.log files that have a line that 1 begins with ERROR:

find . -name "*.log" -exec egrep -l '^ERROR' {} \;

Score: 1

there's a recursive option from egrep you 1 can use

egrep -R "pattern" *.log

Score: 1

If you only want the filenames:

find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec egrep -l pattern {} \;

If you want 1 filenames and matches:

find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec egrep pattern {} /dev/null \;

Source: stackoverflow.com

[ACCEPTED]-how to find files containing a string using egrep-grep

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