I am using the following command to grep for string "/local" in all .pl files,can anyone point what is wrong here?
find . *.pl| xargs grep '/local' -sl
Pass -name argument, and quote *.pl:
find . -name "*.pl" | xargs grep '/local' -sl
Why is everyone suggesting "find"? The shell can work out your ".pl" files for you:
grep "/local" *.pl
You could just as easily
find . -type f -name '*.pl' -exec grep '/local/' {} \;
Or a more optimal form if your find supports it, this passes multiple files to grep at a time
find . -type f -name '*.pl' -exec grep '/local/' {} +
-exec tends to be slow.
I'm partial to:
find . -name "*.pl" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -sl '/local'
...because it isn't confused by filenames with newlines in them.
Note however that some versions of GNU grep appear to have a memory leak that is triggered by grep commands with a very long list of filenames to search. Under such circumstances, -exec is more reliable.
Related
How do I get unix to search inside ALL files for a the string "hello"?
I've tried the following but it doesn't work:
sudo grep "hello" | find / -name "*" 2>/dev/null
Does anyone have any other ideas?
Thank you.
Maybe this one?
sudo cd / && grep -rn "hello" *
EDIT: the 'n' option of course is not needed - it simply displays the line numbers and I find it nice. The 'r' option tells grep to perform recursive search within directories.
Use
grep -r 'pattern' /
If your grep supports -r, (GNU grep does); if not use
find / -type f -exec grep 'pattern' {} +
If your find supports -exec with +, otherwise use
find / -type f -printf '%p\0' | xargs -0 grep 'pattern'
If your find supports -printf and your xargs supports -0, or
find / -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep 'pattern'
If your find supports only -print0 and your xargs supports -0. In all other cases fall back on
find / -type f | xargs grep 'pattern'
This is maximally compatible, with the caveat that certain unusual file names will fail to be grepped and crafted file names could pose a security risk.
Note that you will have to be root in order to be sure of searching all files and that the search will be case-sensitive unless you add -i to grep.
This?
find . -exec grep -H "hello" {} \;
I'm getting results using find with filenames that have '~' and .swp, etc. So I did the following, but is there a better way to do this? The '.*.js' -iname '*.js' part feels "redundant".
$ find ./ '.*.js' -iname '*.js' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -n ".*loginError.*"
find: `.*.js': No such file or directory
./js/signin.js:252: foo.loginError();
./js/signin.js:339:foo.loginError = function() {
./js/signin.js:340: foo.log("ui.loginError");
Try using
find . -name \*.js -print0 | xargs -0 grep -n ".*loginError.*"
That will find only files with 'js' extension and not ending in ~ or .swp
EDIT: Added '0' -print0 (edit requires 6 characters so I'm adding this; ergh!)
To do it all in one command without the xargs you could do it like this
find . -name "*.js" -exec grep -n ".*loginError.*" /dev/null {} \;
the /dev/null piece is to make grep think it's searching multiple files and then it'll output the filename correctly, otherwise it'd just print out the line number without telling you which file it's in
I have a script that I'm running from the home directory to search for all files called "script.sh" that contain the string "watermelon". It's not finding anything but I can clearly see these scripts in the subdirectories. Could someone please suggest a change to the command I'm using:
find . -name script.sh | grep watermelon
You need to use xargs:
find . -name script.sh | xargs grep watermelon
xargs will modify the behavior to search within the files, rather than just search within the names of the files.
find returns the filename it finds by default. If you want it to search within the files then you need to pipe it to xargs or use the -exec and -print predicates:
find . -name script.sh -exec grep -q watermelon {} \; -print
use -type f to indicate file
find . -type f -name "script.sh" -exec grep "watermelon" "{}" +;
or if you have bash 4
shopt -s globstar
grep -Rl "watermelon" **/script.sh
I'm trying to write a bash command that will delete all files matching a specific pattern - in this case, it's all of the old vmware log files that have built up.
I've tried this command:
find . -name vmware-*.log | xargs rm
However, when I run the command, it chokes up on all of the folders that have spaces in their names. Is there a way to format the file path so that xargs passes it to rm quoted or properly escaped?
Try using:
find . -name vmware-*.log -print0 | xargs -0 rm
This causes find to output a null character after each filename and tells xargs to break up names based on null characters instead of whitespace or other tokens.
Do not use xargs. Find can do it without any help:
find . -name "vmware-*.log" -exec rm '{}' \;
Check out the -0 flag for xargs; combined with find's -print0 you should be set.
find . -name vmware-*.log -print0 | xargs -0 rm
GNU find
find . -name vmware-*.log -delete
find . -name vmware-*.log | xargs -i rm -rf {}
find -iname pattern
use -iname for pattern search
To avoid space issue in xargs I'd use new line character as separator with -d option:
find . -name vmware-*.log | xargs -d '\n' rm
I'm trying to construct a find command to process a bunch of files in a directory using two different executables. Unfortunately, -exec on find doesn't allow to use pipe or even \| because the shell interprets that character first.
Here is specifically what I'm trying to do (which doesn't work because pipe ends the find command):
find /path/to/jpgs -type f -exec jhead -v {} | grep 123 \; -print
Try this
find /path/to/jpgs -type f -exec sh -c 'jhead -v {} | grep 123' \; -print
Alternatively you could try to embed your exec statement inside a sh script and then do:
find -exec some_script {} \;
A slightly different approach would be to use xargs:
find /path/to/jpgs -type f -print0 | xargs -0 jhead -v | grep 123
which I always found a bit easier to understand and to adapt (the -print0 and -0 arguments are necessary to cope with filenames containing blanks)
This might (not tested) be more effective than using -exec because it will pipe the list of files to xargs and xargs makes sure that the jhead commandline does not get too long.
With -exec you can only run a single executable with some arguments, not arbitrary shell commands. To circumvent this, you can use sh -c '<shell command>'.
Do note that the use of -exec is quite inefficient. For each file that is found, the command has to be executed again. It would be more efficient if you can avoid this. (For example, by moving the grep outside the -exec or piping the results of find to xargs as suggested by Palmin.)
Using find command for this type of a task is maybe not the best alternative. I use the following command frequently to find files that contain the requested information:
for i in dist/*.jar; do echo ">> $i"; jar -tf "$i" | grep BeanException; done
As this outputs a list would you not :
find /path/to/jpgs -type f -exec jhead -v {} \; | grep 123
or
find /path/to/jpgs -type f -print -exec jhead -v {} \; | grep 123
Put your grep on the results of the find -exec.
There is kind of another way you can do it but it is also pretty ghetto.
Using the shell option extquote you can do something similar to this in order to make find exec stuff and then pipe it to sh.
root#ifrit findtest # find -type f -exec echo ls $"|" cat \;|sh
filename
root#ifrit findtest # find -type f -exec echo ls $"|" cat $"|" xargs cat\;|sh
h
I just figured I'd add that because at least the way i visualized it, it was closer to the OP's original question of using pipes within exec.