UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hi Experts,

I've been trying simple grep to search for a string in a huge number of files in a directory.

grep <pattern> *

this gives the search results as well as the following -

grep: <filename>: Permission denied
grep: <filename>: Permission denied

for files which I don't have read permissions on.

I have three questions-
1) is there any way to eliminate these messages ?
2) is there any way to search in those files as well ?
3) is there any different approach to search for a string in a heap of files ( apart from sed)

To dump the errors

Code:

% grep <pattern> * 2>/dev/null

Try this, it will check only the files having permissions and we can also avoid the errors.

find . -type f -perm 666 -exec grep "pattern" {} \;

Change the permission, as what ever you want.

Another way.

Code:

# First eliminate errors from directories which you cannot read
# Then check that you can read each file before using grep
find . -type f -print 2>/dev/null | while read FILENAME
do
     if [ -r "${FILENAME}" ]
     then
            grep "string" "${FILENAME}"
     fi
done