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From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: grep
Keywords: grep, recursive
Message-ID: <15864@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: 16 Apr 91 20:26:37 GMT
References: <1991Apr14.214414.9815@hellgate.utah.edu> <8304@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 12

In article <8304@idunno.Princeton.EDU> subbarao@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Kartik Subbarao) writes:
>grep pattern */*  (i.e matches all files of all subdirectories)

Often this method will exceed the number of characters allowed for arguments.

>find . -exec grep pattern "{}" \;
>find . -print | xargs grep pattern.

These will fail to print the file name (in the xargs case, it fails
only occasionally).  Basically the problem is nonuniform design of
grep's semantics.  To get reasonable behavior, try
	find . -print | xargs grep pattern /dev/null