[NTLUG:Discuss] searching text in all files for match

[kbrannen@gte.net]

Fred James wrote:
> That makes 3 lovely ways to do it - Thanks all!
> 
> Recap:
> find . -type f | xargs file | grep -i text | cut -f1 -d: | xargs grep 
> "search for this"

Just for fun I'll throw this in...  Stick with this first one as it has better 
performance.  The reason being is it will cause many fewer fork/execs 
(threads, processes, whatever you want to call them :-) and if you have many 
files which match, those extra milliseconds add up quickly.  The "find dir 
-exec" version will fork off a new process for every file.  Read the man page 
on xargs if this doesn't make sense.

Kevin


> 
> find / -type f -print -exec fgrep "text to find" {} \;
> 
> 
> find . -exec grep -l 'text to search for' {} \;