UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I can't get this to work. Running a single command works fine:

Code:

find . -name "*.dat" -exec wc -l '{}' \;

gives me the file name and number of lines in each .dat file in the directory.

But what if I want to pipe commands, e.g. to grep something and get the number of lines with that pattern in each file?

These both give me syntax errors:

Code:

find . -name "*.dat" -exec grep XXX | wc -l '{}' \;
find . -name "*.dat" -exec grep XXX '{}' | wc -l \;

I tried quoting the whole piped expression both ways as well:

Code:

find . -name "*.dat" -exec "grep XXX | wc -l '{}'" \;
find . -name "*.dat" -exec "grep XXX '{}' | wc -l" \;

These both run without errors but neither produces any output (and there are XXX patterns in the files).

How do I write this command?

Thanks.

Your problem arises from the fact that "find" is not a shell and does not know how to process the pipeline character '|'. My solution would be to switch to a shell. My login shell is ksh so I can do:

Code:

find . -name '*.dat'  | while read filename ; do grep XXX $filename | wc -l ; done

try to use xargs -

find . -name '*.dat' | xargs wc -l

Try this

find . -type d -name somedirname -exec ksh -c 'echo -n $1" ";ls -ltr $1|wc -l' {} {} \;


This will serach for all directories from current direcotry and will give count of number (+1) of files/dirs present in that directory.

For your original question:
find . -type f -name "*.dat" -exec ksh -c 'echo -n $1" ";grep XXXX $1|wc -l ' {} {} \;