UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

hi everyone,

We have a heck of a lot of files in a particular directory and I need to search through all of them to find a list of all files containing particular text strings...one being a date and the other being the name of the report that is printed on the files.....

I've tried the following :

egrep -i -l '13-June-2001' 'name of report' *

I always get Arg list too long

can anyone help me please?

kingo

If you are searching for two strings, use -

egrep -i -e "string1" -e "string2" *

Actually you need to use xargs.

egrep -i -e "string1" -e "string2" *| xargs

Do a man on the details.

Basically, it negates the "arg list too long" message.

Hi,
I am trying to do something similar, but I need
to get the results ONLY with matching BOTH search
patterns. When I did the above example I got
results with both patterns AND with either pattern.

For example, I only want to find "date" and "Finished"
and maybe another string from a text file not just "date"
or just "Finished"...

Thanks in Advance!

Then you must do:

cat filename | grep string1 | grep string2 | xargs


This way it will use the first string as a filter and then pass that on to the second string as a further filter.

grep is cool too!

That won't work. That * gets expanded and it's too late for xargs to help. Instead, you gotta let xargs run several copies of the command without ever using a *. Like this:

ls | xargs grep -i -e "string1" -e "string2"

Putting xargs by itself at the end of a pipeline simply gathers all the output lines, strings them together, and spilts them at MAXLINE.

Try:
cat somefile
cat somefile | xargs

Thanks!

Actually, I thought about that, but I was trying to do
some kind of grep/egrep command without pipes. I
guess then that you can not use grep to find two
different strings on the same line.