UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,
i tried to search a string, recursively, in subdirectories with:

find . -type f -print | xargs grep -s hello
i found all files that contain the string "hello"

but i would perform a search also in symbolic link, so i tried with
find -L . -print | xargs grep -s hello
but no result was returned ?

Could you help me, please ?

Maybe there are no files pointed to by symbolic links with hello in them. You can easily test this by creating a link to a file containing hello.

-L should take what a symlink points to. Still you must check for type f

Code:

find -L . -type f -print | xargs grep -s hello

To check if -L works, compare

Code:

find . -type l -print

with

Code:

find -L . -type l -print

The latter should not report anything.

The grep utility searches for text in the file a symbolic link points to; it does not search for text in the symbolic link itself. Some systems provide a readlink utility that will display the contents of a symbolic link that could be used as:

Code:

find . -type l -exec grepsym hello {} +

where grepsym is the following shell script:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
pattern="$1"
shift
for i in "$@"
do	if readlink "$i" | grep -q "$pattern"
	then	printf "%s: " "$i"; readlink "$i"
	fi
done

If your system doesn't come with a readlink utility, it is easy to write a C program that prints the results returned by readlink(argv[1]).

Depending on your application, you might also be able to use the output of ls -l symlink (which will display the contents of symlink at the end of the output.

PS: It is not necessarily true that:

Code:

find -L . -type l -print

will not print anything. That command will print the names of every symbolic link in and under the current directory that points to a file that does not exist.