Unix Find: Question for the experts

[chubba]

I missed the points for being too slow but I usually use:

find /home/chubba/ -type f -exec grep -H 'chubba' {} \;

To find the word 'chubba' in my home folder...

[milanbenes]

good work Chubba, points awarded

from what I can see there are several schools of thought on this finding a string in a file on unix

good work lads

Milan.

[Pondlife]

Stop

Milan,

You really think you should be doing this? Sounds a little like we're pushing out boundaries a bit. .net is far easier in a windows environment.

Remember, if you don't do it they can always get some permie to take the risk.

[milanbenes]

Pondlife,

less of it.

I'm doing a hardware migration

took an offline backup of the existing

created filesystems and users on the new host

restored the backup to the new host

changing the hostname EVERYWHERE to the new hostname and trying to get the system to startup

Everything's workin' fine apart from one component

Milan.

[OrangeHopper]

Similar to suggestion above.

find . | xargs grep <string>

[sappatz]

/home/MilanB

/home/MilanB

is a corrupted filesystem. it needs to be rebuilt from scratch and socially reformatted

[OwlHoot]

cd <root directory to search from>
grep "whattofind" `find .`

Note that is the apostrophe below the escape key on most keyboards.

You don't have to cd.

find <directory_to_search_from> -print -name <wildcard> -exec grep <whattofind> {} \;

where <wildcard> is a pattern of the files you want to search, e.g. *.c (or for that matter fred.c if you only want to check files of that name).

On some versions of unix the file paths won't be printed unless you use the -print argument, although I think this is usually redundant these days.

(Needless to say none of the '<' or '>' symbols are redirects in the above.)

edit: On most unices these days the grep command has a -r option (for 'recursive', i.e. a treewalk a-la find)