Shell Programming and Scripting

You should be careful with NR>8 as it might quit before working on subsequent files.

EDIT: Not even sure if quitting after FNR>8 would be safe...

I assume that by now you have figured out how to find where the MKS toolkit utilities are on your ssytem again... If not, we probably can't help you.

With a Windows operating system that old and an MKS toolkit that is even older, you probably have a 16-bit shell (which leaves you with a relatively limited address space). With 30,000+ files to process, there is a fair chance that you'll overflow the shell size limit on the contents of a shell variable even if less than 10% of your xml files contain the string you're looking for. Therefore, I'd strongly suggest saving the list of files found in a file instead of in a shell variable.

Code:

find . -name "*.xml" -print | xargs fgrep -l Status > StatusXF.txt

and show us any diagnostic output produced. With any luck, StatusXF.txt will contain the list of files you want and won't take forever to run.

The gnuawk nextfile with FNR>8 works as I intended

Code:

find . -name "*.xml" -exec 'FNR>8{nextfile}/Status/{print FILENAME}' {} '+'

Of cause nextfile is a GNU extension so the less elegant compromise is using getline:

Code:

find . -name "*.xml" -exec awk '{while(FNR<8&&getline) if ($0 ~ "Status") print FILENAME}' {} '+'

How do I get it to work again?

---------- Post updated at 07:20 AM ---------- Previous update was at 07:19 AM ----------

Can I simply restart the server to get my find to work as usual?

My comment is just for that command / pipe. No need to restart the server.

Then what do I need to do please in layman terms?

---------- Post updated at 07:26 AM ---------- Previous update was at 07:25 AM ----------

If I restart the server would that fix my problem? It's a test server.

Chubler_XL already proposed a solution to overcome that problem.