Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a situation where I need to search for multiple strings (error messages) such as 'aborted' 'file not found' etc in directory having logs. I have put all the error messages in a text file and using the command.

Code:

grep -f <textfile> <filetobegrepped>

I'm doing this thru a script where I have a loop which will get the file name to be grepped and search for the messages. If ound I need to display the file which contains the pattern.
During exeuction I have the error as follows:

Code:

Usage: grep -hblcnsviw pattern file

Can somebody help what could be wrong here..

This is the piece of code

Code:

for FILE in *; do
   if [ -d $FILE ]
   then
      echo "This is a directory. Search not required"
   else
      grep -f messages.txt $FILE
      if [ $? = 0 ]
      then
         echo "Please check $FILE for errors" >> errorrep
      fi
   fi
done

grep does not check directories for patterns, only files. It does only descent and do recursive searches when using -R, which you don't do anyway in your example.
So you can spare out all those if/then/else/fi tests.

Also you don't have to check all files inside a for loop since grep does this on it's own when you specify a wildcard as parameter.

To see the name of the file that contains the pattern you got in your list, you can add a -l to grep.

So try something like this while standing in the directory where the supposed files are - else add some path to the wildcard accordingly:

Code:

grep -lf mypatternlist.txt *

This code is working fine in my system ,
hopefully some unexpected thing would be in the message.txt ,
can u give some idea about the file messages.txt , can u paste some lines of messages.txt
here

At our installation, the -f option is not working.

A solution with awk:

Code:

awk '
BEGIN{
  while ((getline < "textfile") > 0) {
    a[++i]=$0
  }
}
{
  for(i in a) {
    if($0 ~ a[i]) {
      print
      next
    }
  }
}' filetobegrepped >> errorrep

Possible need to use a differrent grep program?

grep -e doesn't work on solaris