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?