find and searching for specific expression in files

[RW]

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

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