Re: Searching contents of files

[Richard Coleman]

Here is the classical way to do a recursive grep.

For csh/tcsh, define the alias

   alias rgrep 'find . -type f -print | xargs egrep -i \!* /dev/null'

For bash/zsh, define the shell function

   rgrep() { find . -type f -print | xargs egrep -i $1 /dev/null}

There are several variations of these that will work.  But these are 
both fast and portable, and should work on virtually any flavor of unix.

Richard Coleman
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
jason dictos wrote:

Hi All,

   I've always used grep text /*/*/* to recursivly search directories for 
files with the specified text string in them, however this method doesn't 
always work very well (sometimes it bails out halfway through with error 
"Argument list too long"). 

Is there a more effective way to search the contents of files?


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