find and searching for specific expression in files

[Mel Flynn]

On Saturday 30 May 2009 13:56:22 Valentin Bud wrote:
> 2009/5/30 Zbigniew Szalbot <z.szalbot at 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
> >
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>
> 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