Shell Programming and Scripting

Guys,

i've got hundreds of C programs in my ~/devel/ directory and sub-directories. is there a way i can use grep -r followed by some zsh, sh, bash, to find some code that starts with "&foo[N]" or something similar?

thanks in advance!

Code:

find . -name *.c | xargs grep '&foo[N]'

What is "something similar"?
And, what do you mean by "starts with"? First line in file, or first chars in some line in that file.

find . -name *.c | xargs grep '&foo[N]'

brought xargs to mind. but two things here:

1. will your find clause get me only my .c files? [i hope, i hope]
2. will [A-Za-z] or somesuch work to replace "foo"?

basically, i'm looking for anunknown variable that is prepended with "&" and
ends with [N]. N is most likely 0.

thanks.

How about

Code:

grep -Eri "\&[[:alpha:]]{1,3}\[[0-9]\]" *.c

the ampersand is the first byte in the variable. it is an array that starts {probably} at 0.

---------- Post updated at 02:26 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:08 PM ----------


Yes! probably this kind of voodoo may do the trick. A day ago, a guy i've known for many years shows me how-to copy a string array into a Global variable that i may use [or may NOT] use. his code is old and needs a few tweaks. no problem. i am trying to understand how the file foo.16.text can be copied into (global) char *GtkLabelBar[256];

but before i just-do-it, i need to understand why his example works. i have found many ancient examples; want to print them out so i can get some clues.

Once i see it, i'll continue.

Note that grep -r statement will not find *.c files in subdirectories. The find statement will also fail to do that if the are any *.c files present in the current directory . In both cases *.c is expanded by the shell and the the result is provided as parameters to the command. To find all *.c files *.c needs to be quoted:

Code:

find . -name '*.c' -exec grep -E '&[[:alpha:]]+\[[0-9]+\]' {} +

Another thing is that xargs will break things if there are spaces in the filename. The example shows how it could be done without xargs, by using -exec . The + sign makes it at least as efficient as xargs