Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!aplcen!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: grep
Message-ID: <14225@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 23 Oct 90 20:15:09 GMT
References: <1990Oct23.123025.18012@kodak.kodak.com>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 18

In article <1990Oct23.123025.18012@kodak.kodak.com> tiefel@sunshine.Kodak.COM (Lenny Tiefel) writes:
>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?

"grep" doesn't grok directories at all.
However, UNIX is a toolkit environment.  Whenever you want to execute
a command on all files, or some readily selected subset of files,
within a directory hierarchy, you should think of "find" and "xargs".
(If you don't have "xargs", complain to your vendor.)

	find root_name -type f -print | xargs grep pattern /dev/null

The extra argument to "grep" is to ensure that the filename will be
printed for each matching line.  (Workaround for a wart in "grep"'s
design.)