UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm working on a project right now and I'm supposed to figure out how to go into a file located in a directory called ~cs252/Assingment/commandAsst/project/ and find all of the function calls to "sequentialInsert" and I tried using

grep "\<sequentialInsert\>"~cs252/Assingment/commandAsst/project/

and that didn't work...so I'm a little stuck right now...Could anyone point me in the right direction? Am I supposed to use some wildcards in place of sequentialInsert?

adamsy Try simply:
find /cs252/Assingment/commandAsst/project/ -exec grep -l 'sequentialInsert'{} \;

Search the directory and list the name of all files matching the string 'sequentialInsert'. Note that you can shorten the path in the find statement. This will cause find to search down the directory tree.
see man find and man grep

Add some grep switches to suit your needs. A few examples:
Ignore case (-i)
Display the line number (-n) of the file where the match occured.
Display the name (-l) of the file where the match occured.

Hey, I tried that command that you posted for me and I got two error messages. "find: incomplete statement" and "sequentialInsert;: Command not found". Do you know what I'm doing wrong here? Thanks for the help.

Code:

find /cs252/Assingment/commandAsst/project/ -exec grep -l 'sequentialInsert'{} \;

it all goes on 1 line. i can only assume you put it on 2 lines.

Under Solaris, I had to add a space before the {}. Otherwise it just hung with no path info. Reference: The argument {} is replaced by the current path name.

So,

find /cs252/Assingment/commandAsst/project/ -exec grep -l 'sequentialInsert' {} \;

Cheers,

Keith

I finally got it to work...It was a problem with the -| in the command. I just took that out and it's working with no errors. Do you have any idea why that could cause an error in the command?

It should be a grep -l (as in the letter in the alphabet). Your text is a grep -| (as in the pipe).

From the grep man page:

-l Print only the names of files with matching lines,
separated by NEWLINE characters. Does not repeat the
names of files when the pattern is found more than
once.

Cheers,

Keith