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Full Discussion: Arg list too long
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Arg list too long Post 302764501 by Don Cragun on Thursday 31st of January 2013 02:45:24 PM
Old 01-31-2013
I assume that bipinajith's proposed solution will still fail because /app/folder1/* is expanding to a list of arguments too long to process. The following should avoid that problem and be MUCH more efficient:
Code:
find /app/folder1 -name '*.dat' -type f -exec grep '.sh' {} +

Note, however, that if your .dat files are binary files (rather than text files) grep might not work. (The standards only specify the behavior of grep when its input files are text files.)

Also note that if grep is called with only one file operand, the name of the file in which the line is found will not be printed; just the contents of the matching line. If your .dat files are text files and you want the name of the file to be printed as well as the matched lines even if there is only one file operand, add /dev/null as another file operand. If you only want the names of matching files, but don't need to see the matched lines use the -l (letter ell; not digit 1) option.

And note that the pattern specified by '.sh' is a basic regular expression will match the two characters sh as long as they are not the 1st two characters on a line. If you want to match the three characters .sh, you need to add the -F option, use the obsolescent fgrep utility instead of grep, or escape the period in the BRE.
 

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GREP(1) 						      General Commands Manual							   GREP(1)

NAME
grep, g - search a file for a pattern SYNOPSIS
grep [ option ... ] pattern [ file ... ] g [ option ... ] pattern [ file ... ] DESCRIPTION
Grep searches the input files (standard input default) for lines that match the pattern, a regular expression as defined in regexp(7) with the addition of a newline character as an alternative (substitute for |) with lowest precedence. Normally, each line matching the pattern is `selected', and each selected line is copied to the standard output. The options are -c Print only a count of matching lines. -h Do not print file name tags (headers) with output lines. -e The following argument is taken as a pattern. This option makes it easy to specify patterns that might confuse argument parsing, such as -n. -i Ignore alphabetic case distinctions. The implementation folds into lower case all letters in the pattern and input before interpre- tation. Matched lines are printed in their original form. -l (ell) Print the names of files with selected lines; don't print the lines. -L Print the names of files with no selected lines; the converse of -l. -n Mark each printed line with its line number counted in its file. -s Produce no output, but return status. -v Reverse: print lines that do not match the pattern. -f The pattern argument is the name of a file containing regular expressions one per line. -b Don't buffer the output: write each output line as soon as it is discovered. Output lines are tagged by file name when there is more than one input file. (To force this tagging, include /dev/null as a file name argument.) Care should be taken when using the shell metacharacters $*[^|()= and newline in pattern; it is safest to enclose the entire expression in single quotes '...'. An expression starting with '*' will treat the rest of the expression as literal characters. G invokes grep with -n and forces tagging of output lines by file name. If no files are listed, it searches all files matching *.C *.b *.c *.h *.m *.cc *.java *.cgi *.pl *.py *.tex *.ms SOURCE
/src/cmd/grep /bin/g SEE ALSO
ed(1), awk(1), sed(1), sam(1), regexp(7) DIAGNOSTICS
Exit status is null if any lines are selected, or non-null when no lines are selected or an error occurs. GREP(1)
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