find and searching for specific expression in files

[Mel Flynn]

On Saturday 30 May 2009 18:14:49 RW wrote:
> On Sat, 30 May 2009 14:12:50 +0200
>
> Mel Flynn <mel.flynn+fbsd.questions at mailing.thruhere.net> wrote:
> > On Saturday 30 May 2009 13:56:22 Valentin Bud wrote:
> > > 2009/5/30 Zbigniew Szalbot <z.szalbot at lcwords.com>
> > >
> > >  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
>
> You can replace "egrep -r <string> *" with "egrep -r <string> ."
> i.e. recurse from the current directory, rather than search or recurse
> on everything that matches *. That avoids the first two problems, and
> most of the time the third doesn't matter

OP (and myself) have a different concept of 'most of the time'. But this may 
be cause I'm already so used to this concept that my fingers have it store 
locally and I could've used grep -r or the overall win is minimal (I often use 
-name '*.h', and arguably in small trees it wouldn't matter).

>
> > - cannot be combined with other search criteria such as the file's
> > timestamp.

-- 
Mel