Help with grep to show date/time of file


 
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# 1  
Old 03-18-2020
Help with grep to show date/time of file

Hi,


This is similar to what's been asked in the post below:

grep to show date/time of file the string was found in.


The solution sort of work / not work, the problem is if there is no match, then xargs does a full listing. That is if it found file/s that matches the search string and hence file exist, it does list the files but if it doesn't find a match it do a full listing instead Smilie


See example below:


Code:
$: ls -ltr
total 16
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            0 Mar 19 09:36 file1
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            0 Mar 19 09:36 file2
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            0 Mar 19 09:36 file3
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            0 Mar 19 09:36 file4
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            0 Mar 19 09:36 file5
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            15 Mar 19 09:36 corrupt.txt
$: grep -il "bad" * | xargs ls -l
-rw-r-----   1 tester   dba           15 Mar 19 09:36 corrupt.txt
$: grep -il "corrupt" * | xargs ls -l
total 16
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            15 Mar 19 09:36 corrupt.txt
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            0 Mar 19 09:36 file1
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            0 Mar 19 09:36 file2
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            0 Mar 19 09:36 file3
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            0 Mar 19 09:36 file4
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            0 Mar 19 09:36 file5
$: uname -a
SunOS [hostname] 5.11 11.3 sun4v sparc sun4v
$: cat corrupt.txt
BAD FILE FOUND

And just realized I can just actually just do ls -l but it gave me the same behaviour:


Code:
$: ls -l `grep -il "bad" *`
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            15 Mar 19 09:36 corrupt.txt
$: ls -l `grep -il "corrupt" *`
total 16
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            15 Mar 19 09:36 corrupt.txt
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            0 Mar 19 09:36 file1
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            0 Mar 19 09:36 file2
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            0 Mar 19 09:36 file3
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            0 Mar 19 09:36 file4
-rw-r-----   1 tester   omg            0 Mar 19 09:36 file5

I guess this is the expected behavior but kinda hoping it'll just do nothing if it doesn't find any or print something maybe instead? Any suggestion?
# 2  
Old 03-18-2020
No surprise. If the grep "command substitution" delivers the "empty" value, ls-l uses the default: . . man ls:
Quote:
DESCRIPTION
List information about the FILEs (the current directory by default).
Add a certainly non-existent file name (difficult to find, as there are almost no restrictions on file names), and suppress stderr output:

Code:
ls -l $(grep -il "corrupt" *) FALSE 2>/dev/null


EDIT: or, check the grep result upfront, and just don't call ls if empty...

Last edited by RudiC; 03-18-2020 at 06:33 PM..
This User Gave Thanks to RudiC For This Post:
# 3  
Old 03-26-2020
Thanks for the explanation
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