UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

All,

When i use the below command for recrusive search for a pattern it is not working in my macine I am using HP Unix. Please let me know where i am wrong.

grep -rs "pattern"

i an expecting the same result as find . | xargs grep "pattern" ..

Please let me know.

Thanks,
Arun.

can you tell us what is the error message ?
Example on FreeBSD :

Code:

[root@srv cgi-bin]$ grep -rs /usr/local/ check.pl  
#!/usr/local/bin/perl

showing

grep: illegal option -- r
usage: grep [-E|-F] [-c|-l|-q] [-bhinsvx] -e pattern_list...
[-f pattern_file...] [file...]
usage: grep [-E|-F] [-c|-l|-q] [-bhinsvx] [-e pattern_list...]
-f pattern_file... [file...]
usage: grep [-E|-F] [-c|-l|-q] [-bhinsvx] pattern [file...]


Is there anyway other thean using Xrags with find command . Please suggest

Well, not all greps support the recursive option. I have used Solaris and HP and never seen the '-r' that you mention here. And why don't you want to use the xargs command?

-edit
To see if you can use a particular option, read the man page of the command for that OS. If the option is not mentioned there, you can't use it.
-/edit

Thanks blowtorch for clearing my long term doubt.

Code:

# find /some/dir -type f -exec grep '^myregex$' {} /dev/null \;

Cheers
ZB

ZB, using the '-l' option achieves (almost) the same result. But I didn't get that /dev/null thing. Can you explain?