Search String: Find and Grep

Question

There must be a better / shorter way to do this:

# Find files that contain  in current directory
#   (including sub directories) 
$ find .          


        

Answer 1

If this is going to be a common search utility you're going to utilize, you may want to take a look at ack, which combines both the find and the grep together into this functionality that you're looking for. It has fewer features than grep, though 99% of my searches are suited perfectly by replacing all instances of grep with ack.

Besides the other answers given, I also suggest this construct:

find . -type f -name "*.html" -print|xargs -I FILENAME grep "< string-to-find>" FILENAME

Even better, if the filenames have spaces in them, you can either quote "FILENAME" or pass a null-terminated (instead of newline-terminated) result from find to xargs, and then have xargs strip those out itself:

find . -type f -name "*.html" -print0|xargs -0 -I FILENAME grep "< string-to-find>" FILENAME
                             here --^ and --^

Here, the name FILENAME can actually be anything, but it needs to match both

find . -type f -name "*.html" -print0|xargs -0 -I FILENAME grep "< string-to-find>" FILENAME
                                           here --^                           and --^

Like this:

find . -type f -name "*.html" -print0|xargs -0 -I GRRRR grep "< string-to-find>" GRRR
                                           this --^                       this --^

It's essentially doing the same thing as the {} used within the find statement itself to state "the line of text that this returned". Otherwise, xargs just tacks the results of find to the END of all the rest of the commands you give it (which doesn't help much if you want grep to search inside a file, which is usually specified last on the command-line).