UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi all,

I have a problem when i grep for a particular field among all fhe files in the directory.

if i do an ls -l field *
i can find it.

however at the moment the number of files in the directory are close to 28000 and it returns an

ksh: /usr/bin/grep: arg list too long

Assuming i just want to grep all files with a date at say Jun 28 as the range and not all of them, how do i do it on the command line?

Regards,
Alvin

I am not sure by your question if you are looking for file names or contents of a file. 'find' or 'xargs' is probably what you are looking for. With find you could do something like:

find ./ -mtime 3 -print

This will find all files from 3 days ago (June 28th currently). By the time you read this you may have to adjust the number.

You could modify this to:

find ./ -mtime 3 -exec grep field {}\;

This will look for the word 'field' in all the files.

The other option is to use xargs, which may resolve the "arg list too long" issue like so:

ls * | xargs grep field

Hopefully one of these works for you or leads you down the right path.

Does this help

ls -l|grep "Jun 18"