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From: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Subject: Re: grep
Message-ID: <1991Apr15.175038.8660@athena.mit.edu>
Keywords: grep, recursive
Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
References: <1991Apr14.214414.9815@hellgate.utah.edu> <1991Apr15.042100.11727@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 91 17:50:38 GMT
Lines: 26

In article <1991Apr15.042100.11727@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu>, akbloom@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu (Keith Bloom) writes:
|> find . -name '*' -print | xargs grep pattern

  1) The "-name '*'" is unnecessary.  If you're checking for any name, you
don't need to check the name at all.

  2) This will try to search directories and special files as well, something
that he probably doesn't want to do.  Replace "-name '*'" with "-type f".

|> If you have a huge directory tree with thousands of files in it, this
|> may not work.

  Why not?  The whole purpose of xargs is to take lots of arguments on
standard input and run the desired program on as many as possible in each
pass, running the program multiple times if necessary to get all of the
arguments processed.

|> find . -name '*' -print -exec grep pattern {} \;

  Once again, replace "-name '*'" with "-type f".

-- 
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