topic recursive grep in Operating System - HP-UX

recursive grep

Dee_3 — Mon, 12 Nov 2001 17:30:56 GMT

Can I grep recursively? I have a directory that has directories and I want to search the whole structure for a string - is there a way to do this?

Re: recursive grep

harry d brown jr — Mon, 12 Nov 2001 17:33:27 GMT

find /dir -type f -exec grep -l stringhere {} \;

live free or die
harry

Re: recursive grep

James R. Ferguson — Mon, 12 Nov 2001 17:35:35 GMT

Hi Terri:

# cd thedirectory
# find . -type -f -print | xargs grep string

This will recursively search the current directory and all subdirectories looking for *files* only which contain the the string "string". The use of 'xargs' in lieu of '-exec' with the the 'find' utility is less resource intensive.

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: recursive grep

Roger Baptiste — Mon, 12 Nov 2001 17:36:51 GMT

find $DIR -type f | xargs grep

-raj

Re: recursive grep

harry d brown jr — Mon, 12 Nov 2001 17:42:12 GMT

Terri,

Also, if you know that the file is less than say 1mb (1000000) then you can add that knowledge to "find":

find /searchdir -type f -size -1000000c -exec grep -l {} \;

If you aren't sure about case add the "i" option to the grep:

find /searchdir -type f -size -1000000c -exec grep -il {} \;

live free or die
harry

Re: recursive grep

Alan Riggs — Mon, 12 Nov 2001 20:15:02 GMT

Re: recursive grep

Robin Wakefield — Mon, 12 Nov 2001 23:36:38 GMT

Hi Terri,

The other trick I do is:

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

You know /dev/null can *never* contain the string...but, since the grep now has more than one filename in its file list, it will print the matching line + the name of the matching file.

Rgds, Robin