find myDir -name '*.html' -print0 | xargs -0 grep substr /dev/null
Notes:
Find recurses through the directory tree myDir... use "." if you want
to search from the current directory.
-print0 delimits file names with a null character, so file names with
embedded white space (spaces, tabs, newlines) in their names will still
work. This can be important when traversing a filesystem that might
contain Windows created files (such as those hosted by a samba server).
xargs reads arguments from it's stdin and runs as many invocations of
grep as required. The -0 argument tells it that the file names are
null terminated (corresponding to -print0).
Putting the /dev/null on is important, because you don't know how many
files find will find. If it happens to find one file, or some number
of files which modulo divided by the number of arguments allowed, it is
possible for grep to be called with a single file name as an argument.
In this case, grep will assume you know what file you gave it (since
you only gave it one file name) and will not print the name of the file
in which the matching strings were found. By giving grep an argument
of /dev/null, you are guaranteeing that it always has at least two
filename arguments. Obviously, the searched for string will not be
found in /dev/null.
This method is the most portable way of doing your recursive grep and
works on any unix that supports -print0 and xargs -0. If you find
yourself on a unix where the find command doesn't support -print0 and
xargs doesn't support -0 (or you know for a fact that you don't have
any file names with spaces in them), you can use -print and xargs
without the -0 option.
-jan-
--
Jan L. Peterson
Semi-Unemployed "Computer Facilitator"
http://www.peterson.ath.cx/~jlp/resume.html
____________________
BYU Unix Users Group
http://uug.byu.edu/
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