Recursive grep | UNIX | Tech-Recipes

Recursive grep

Contributed by roshi

October 7, 2004

Tagged: UNIX

This tip is for grepping a pattern even in the sub-directories of a particular directory in addition to the files in the current directory.

Since grep -R <> <> is not available on all flavors, this can be really helpful.

The command is as follows :-

find -name | xargs grep

The arguments are self-explanatory.
The output of find will be xarg‘ed to the input of grep
and these will be searched for searchstring.

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htihan 3 years ago 1 point
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Thank you so much,

It is one of those days.. I spent almost an hour for this.....

Best, peace...
Hal

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Anonymous 3 years ago 1 point
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that's great and all, but you dont get filenames

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seacoder 3 years ago 1 point
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find . -name "*" -exec grep <pattern> {} /dev/null ;

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Anonymous 3 years ago 1 point
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find /users/ -type f -name "*" -exec grep -ls sqlload {} ;
It gives output like this:
/users/hattb/shirley_test_file

The -type f switch tells it to only look in text files.
If you want to redirect the output to a file:
find /users/hattb -type f -name "*" -exec grep -ls sqlload {} ; >out.txt

Hope this helps,
Shirley

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Anonymous 3 years ago 1 point
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It's so great. Thanks.

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Anonymous 1 year ago 1 point
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find|xargs grep 'search text'

is easier to type :-)

xargs rocks.

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Anonymous 1 year ago 1 point
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For those of you with a really stripped down config with no xargs and a find that doesn't support -exec, the old fashioned way:

for i in `find <path>`; do grep <pattern> $i; done

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