I've searched the forum on how to do recursive grep and have found the probable solution. My problem is it doesn't print the results! I used this command grep -li lam * and it finds the correct file in that directory. When I use the find command to do this recursively I can hear the harddrive working but no results are printed to the screen. The command I used was this: find / -type f -exec grep -li lam {}\; I was hoping this would search the entire root directory for the word lam and print the filenames out for me. I believe it does the search but nothing is printed. Any thoughts?

If you want to print filenames aswell, you need to specify at least two filenames to each pass of grep, so something such as the following will do the trick...

find / -type f -exec grep -li "lam" {} /dev/null \;

Although... it should print the filenames without the /dev/null as -l is used. Are you sure there are files containing the searchstring that you are specifying, and you have permission to read them?

Cheers
ZB