UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

There has to be a way to do this on the command line without creating a shell scriopt. Search for a string in all the sub dirs and print out the files and location?

Thanks for re-posting. Could you explain how the parts of that search are working. I mean, it works but would like to learn something here.

Code:

find . -type f -exec grep -l "somesearchstring" {} /dev/null \;

find . -type f # find all files from the currend directory down
-exec grep -l "somesearchstring" {} # execute the grep command on each file found {} means the found file
the use of /dev/null is a hack so that grep will output the name of the file indicated by {} because it thinks it is searching two files
\; is the end of the exec command.

Code:

find . -type f | xargs grep -l somesearchstring

find all files and use xargs to pass them as arguments to grep, for a full explanation of xargs I would suggest you read the man page.

Cool. Appreciate the help