UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

When I enter the command below grep appears to be returning a file it shouldn't.

find . -name "*.*" -exec grep "testing" {} /dev/null \;
:tps3Mailfile
./SSI.ksh: # create TECHOUT dummy for test for testing purposes
./ftprimi1.ksh:# before running job in prod... change FTP to go to rimi instead of rad box(testing)
./pharm_alert.ksh:# send mail for testing, but not in prod

The file, tps3Mailfile does not contain the search string testing, why does this command continually pull this file? If I rerun the above using -type option instead of -name for the find command then the proper files are returned. Also, if you look at the path returned for this file it lists :tps3MailFile instead of ./tps3MailFile as one would expect.

Anyone have any ideas why this file is returned? If you use grep on this directory without the find command then the proper list of files is returned.

Thanks

D

A directory is a file which contains entries and each entry is a filename and an inode number. I doubt that you really mean to run grep on a directory. Instead you mean to run grep on the files in a directory. These are two very different concepts. But your find statement is doing both of them. The current directory is . and it will match *.* and grep will open it and process it. Your output is odd, but directories are not ascii files. Try these commands:

grep testing .
grep testing . | od -c

and maybe you can get a handle on what exactly is happening.

-exec is pretty inefficient.. use xargs. Try something like:

find . -type f | xargs grep "string"

Yes ... make sure that grep is executed only on plain text files. So I would suggest

find /dirname -name 'blah' -type f -exec grep {} \;