Shell Programming and Scripting

Sorry, I meant to take out the print, good catch.

The /dev/null is just a trick to force grep to output the file name, it will not always do so if only one file is listed as happens in find. If I run the command you posted I get, as I expected, a list of all the files (matching the pattern or not ) , and the output from grep for each file where a match occurs.

Code:

find /searchdir -type f -exec grep -l "some string" {} /dev/null \;

or

Code:

find /searchdir -type f | xargs grep -l "some string"

give me a list of files in which the match occurs, in a well behaved grep I should not need the /dev/null, unless I want to use the grep without -l and print the matched lines and the files in which they occur.

nice trick, your solution is much easier to read, thanks for that

you can use..awk command

Code:

awk '/serch_string/' file_name

What if i dont know the filename?

if the user wants to search for all files which contain a specific string inside the file?

for example, i want to search for all the files which have the text "woodstock" ?

This was already posted in the same thread

Code:

find . -name '*.*' -print | xargs grep -il 'pattern'

This helped me with what I was looking for - thanks!