Shell Programming and Scripting

Hey guys iv written a basic function to ask for input location to find then grep a certain string in the file at the location of the find.
For some reason it finds the file with the certain string it however it says directory not found on each string before the whitespace

eg enter location to search
/home/s/steves/
enter string to grep in /home/s/steves/
hello world

/home/s/steves/myfile.txt hello world
/usr/bin/local/grep/ hello no such file or directory found
/usr/bin/local/grep/ world no such file or directory found
Does anyone no any reason i tried dealing with the white space below but not sure if its correct


$FIND "$path" -type f | $AWK -F "\n" '{ print "\"" $1 "\"" } ' | $XARGS $GREP $searchString

you will need to quote the search string.

grep "hello world"

Hi thanks for your fast response is there a way where i dont have to insert ""?

you can put the quotes in the code

Code:

$FIND "$path" -type f | $AWK -F "\n" '{ print "\"" $1 "\"" } ' | $XARGS $GREP "$searchString"

Hi thanks i forgot to do that it now works

Just another quick question
to make my code more portable im declaring functions like this at the start my program

eg

READ=/usr/bin/read

i do a which read and it says thats where it is located

however the read does not work it does not proceed with asking for user input when the code is run if i call it using $READ variableName

i use GREP=/usr/local/bin/grep and call it with $GREP that works
but if i use $read lowercase it works any idea's?

most often uppercase names are reserved for the OS.
so in your OS you may find that $READ is already need by the OS.

as for making your code more portable...
I would just set your path at the start of the script, then just use commands directly.

Code:

#!/bin/sh
PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin; export PATH

find "$path" -type f | awk -F "\n" '{ print "\"" $1 "\"" } ' | $XARGS grep "$searchString"