Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 05:52:02 -0400 From: Richard Coleman <richardcoleman@mindspring.com> To: jason@dictos.com Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Searching contents of files Message-ID: <3F97A4C2.1080001@mindspring.com> In-Reply-To: <200310211158.11136.jason@dictos.com> References: <200310211158.11136.jason@dictos.com>
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Here is the classical way to do a recursive grep.
For csh/tcsh, define the alias
alias rgrep 'find . -type f -print | xargs egrep -i \!* /dev/null'
For bash/zsh, define the shell function
rgrep() { find . -type f -print | xargs egrep -i $1 /dev/null}
There are several variations of these that will work. But these are
both fast and portable, and should work on virtually any flavor of unix.
Richard Coleman
richardcoleman@mindspring.com
jason dictos wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I've always used grep text /*/*/* to recursivly search directories for
> files with the specified text string in them, however this method doesn't
> always work very well (sometimes it bails out halfway through with error
> "Argument list too long").
>
> Is there a more effective way to search the contents of files?
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