program or unix command that finds patern on documents of a folder?

[maxpayne_gr]

hi,

I am trying to find a phrase inside a bounce of documents inside a specific folder.
Is there any program (like a text editor) or a unix command so I can retrieve every document that contains the specific phrase inside that folder?

Thanx in advance

[smolloy]

If all the files are in plain text, and you're looking for the phrase "my_phrase", the following might be what you need,

find ./ | xargs grep my_phrase

This will search every file in the current folder, and every folder beneath it, for files containing the string "my_phrase".

Let us know if that helps.

[i92guboj]

If all the files are in plain text, and you're looking for the phrase "my_phrase", the following might be what you need,

find ./ | xargs grep my_phrase

This will search every file in the current folder, and every folder beneath it, for files containing the string "my_phrase".

Let us know if that helps.

Wouldn't this be just the same that this?

grep -r <string> /path/to/search/*

[smolloy]

Wouldn't this be just the same that this?

grep -r <string> /path/to/search/*

Well, you learn something every day, don't you!

I don't know why I never thought of searching grep's man page to find the recursive option -- I've always just piped "find" into it instead.

Thanks for correcting me.

[i92guboj]

No problem.

Your approach is *mostly* correct, though a bit more complicated. It has one problem though: if the argument list get too big it will fail.

In that, case, you *must* use grep -r, or if you like the pipe approach, use a while loop to read all the values:

find ./ | while read file; do grep <string> "$file"; done

This should work always, regardless of the number of files being listed by 'find'.