Shell Programming and Scripting

I have thousands of files in a directory. I need to find/list all files that have the below matching string -

RETURNCODE:[4] "1017"


Thank you!

grep?

Code:

grep 'RETURNCODE:[4] "1017"' *

Just how many files?

Scott, I guess the square bracket need to be escaped, isn't that right?

Also since OP is interested in file names with matching pattern, -l option can be used:

Code:

grep -l 'RETURNCODE:\[4\] "1017"' *

If you mean that you want to list files in the directory that contain this string, try:

Code:

grep -Fl 'RETURNCODE:[4] "1017"' *

or if that gives you a complaint about an argument list that is too long:

Code:

find . ! -name "." -prune -type f -exec grep -Fl 'RETURNCODE:[4] "1017"' {} +

Yes, I should have used fast grep or escapes which, had I bothered to test I'd have seen

Scott,
I don't think this will work. The grep utility (unless invoked as grep -F or fgrep) treats the search string as an basic regular expression; not as a string. So [4]in the expression will match 4 instead of [4]. When grep is invoked with the -F option, the search string is treated as a fixed string instead of as a BRE. (The current standards don't mention fgrep, but historically, fgrep was a hard link to grep and when grep saw that it was invoked as fgrep it acted as if it had been invoked with what the standards now specify as the -F option.)