Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 14:12:50 +0200 From: Mel Flynn <mel.flynn+fbsd.questions@mailing.thruhere.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Cc: Zbigniew Szalbot <z.szalbot@lcwords.com>, Valentin Bud <valentin.bud@gmail.com> Subject: Re: find and searching for specific expression in files Message-ID: <200905301412.50958.mel.flynn%2Bfbsd.questions@mailing.thruhere.net> In-Reply-To: <139b44430905300456x62bf9c0ybf46bcab6b64e25@mail.gmail.com> References: <dd6b168d2af9ddbcfc52e5c0397e4d6a.squirrel@relay.lc-words.com> <80cddf609e38046ffa0ce3f2bdab235c.squirrel@relay.lc-words.com> <139b44430905300456x62bf9c0ybf46bcab6b64e25@mail.gmail.com>
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On Saturday 30 May 2009 13:56:22 Valentin Bud wrote: > 2009/5/30 Zbigniew Szalbot <z.szalbot@lcwords.com> > > > >> Can you please give me a hint how to use find to search for a specific > > >> text within files? > > > > > > Generally, you don't - find(1) does not examine the contents of files > > > by itself, just their directory information. You normally use grep(1) > > > to search within a file. > > > > Ahhh - I use grep on daily basis. Now why didn't I think of it? I got so > > fixed on the idea of using find that I completely forgot about grep.... > > > > Sorry for the noise and thank you very much for your help! > > > > -- > > Zbigniew Szalbot > > > > _______________________________________________ > > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > > To unsubscribe, send any mail to " > > freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" > > Hello Mr. Zbigniew Szalbot, > > You can use egrep -r * (grep -e) to search for specific text pattern while > you are in a directory with many sub directories. The output is nice > because it tells you the file in which the text pattern was found :). Discouraged because: - it's possible to hit maxarglen if the root directory has many subdirectories. - Will not search hidden directories in the root directory because of the shell glob - cannot be combined with other search criteria such as the file's timestamp. find . -type f -mtime 2 -exec grep '^Subject: \[SPAM\]' {} + will find all messages in a maildir modified within the last 2 minutes where the subject has been flagged as spam. I use + rather then ; so that one invocation for grep is done whenever maxarglen is hit (like if you used xargs(1)), rather then one grep per file. -- Mel
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