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Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 06:46:54 -0700 (PDT)
From: Viktor Lazlo <viktorlazlo@telus.net>
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To: jason dictos <jason@dictos.com>
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cc: questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Searching contents of files
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On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, jason dictos wrote:

>    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?

Try:

     find /whateverdirectory -type f -print | xargs grep mysearchstring

Cheers,

Viktor