Searching contents of files

Richard Coleman richardcoleman at mindspring.com
Thu Oct 23 02:52:01 PDT 2003


Here is the classical way to do a recursive grep.

For csh/tcsh, define the alias

    alias rgrep 'find . -type f -print | xargs egrep -i \!* /dev/null'

For bash/zsh, define the shell function

    rgrep() { find . -type f -print | xargs egrep -i $1 /dev/null}

There are several variations of these that will work.  But these are 
both fast and portable, and should work on virtually any flavor of unix.

Richard Coleman
richardcoleman at mindspring.com

jason dictos wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
>    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?





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