Shell Programming and Scripting

hi all
i have been trying to search for a table name in all the files in a directory. i gave the following command

find /mydir -type f | xargs grep "search string"

but i am getting an error.
there are some directories which i cannot access in the given path so i am getting error as permission denied , cannot access /mydir/bk ....

is there any way to skip these un accessible folders and get along with the search.

pls help
Thankq
Appu

redirect the error messages to /dev/null.


try some thing as following example ....

Code:

find /dir1 -name "*.java" 2>/dev/null

I always do it with command:

find $dir ...options... -exec grep $pattern {} \;

dont worry about 'permission denied' - in this case they're only warnings
from find and can be supressed by appending "2> /dev/null"

Regards

Hi,
Thankq so much
that was very fast..
command works

For what it's worth....

That "find" command will not show the filenames from within which the pattern is matched (it'll only show the matched line(s) itself) since grep is only seeing one file at a time. Some greps support the -H option to force prepending the "filename: output", but these would probably be newer greps that support -R anyway to do a recursive grep.

You can force it to show the filename by using

find /path/to/files -type f -exec grep "pattern" {} /dev/null \; 2>/dev/null

so that grep is invoked with multiple files to search and thus prepends the matching filename to the output. Another way is with xargs

find /path/to/files -type f | xargs grep "pattern" 2>/dev/null

since by default xargs will invoke grep with multiple files.

Cheers
ZB

In order to obtain only list of marching files
one can specify -l (small L letter) option to grep:

find $dir ...options... -exec grep -l $pattern {} \;

Regards