UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Can any one tell me if there is an easy way to find a text in an unknown file name in a dierectory.

I'm trying to search for the text "where is john going" from a file
whose name I do not even know. There are about 1000 files in that directory and one of the files has this text in it.

Can any one tell me how I can achive this?


Thanks,
Ted

ls | xargs grep -l "where john is going"

And if they're in more than one directory, you could use this in the top directory:

find . -exec grep -l "where john is going" {} \;

cd /into/your/dir

grep "where john is going" *


Regs David

That is guaranteed to fail on most systems. You are asking the shell to replace * with a list of "about 1000 files". A command line must be less than LINE_MAX which is often 2048.

Hi perderabo,

You're right. In this case it would have been ok probably as it are only 1000 files, but in case of extreme large directories, this indeed fails.
Better to stick to the other solutions then, or just remember that it might fail once.

Regs David

Since the files reside in the same directory they must have unique names. There are only 254 values that can reside in a byte used as a filename. After you max out the 1 character filenames, you will need 746 two character filenames. 746 * 2 + 254 = 1746. And now you need 999 spaces to separate them... 1746 + 999 = 2745. So if you're willing to tolerate a lot of unprintable filenames, you can get 1000 names into a list that is 2745 bytes long, but that is the absolute minimum. And you still need 2 bytes to have a one character command.

This is not probably ok, it is guaranteed to fail on a system with LINE_MAX set to 2048.