[SOLVED] Restrict output to display one file each?

[littlebigman]

Hello

I use 'grep -Ri "mypattern" .' to search for all files in the current directory recursively that contain "mypattern".

But this command returns every single occurence, so that if a given file has several occurences of the pattern, the screen fills up pretty quick.

More than likely, there's a way to restrict the output so that it only displays each file once, no matter how many occurences it contains, but I couldn't find how to do it.

Does someone know?

Thank you.

[tornow]

grep -c will:

  -c, --count
              Suppress  normal output; instead print a count of matching lines
              for each input file.  With the -v,  --invert-match  option  (see
              below), count non-matching lines.  (-c is specified by POSIX.)

But it will also list the files which contain 0 occurences of <pattern>.


I did a bit of playing and came up with this
(search for the pattern "test" in all files in the current directory) :

#!/usr/bin/env bash

for e in *
do
    grep test $e > /dev/null
    if [ "$?" -eq 0 ]
    then
        echo "at minimum one occurence of test in $e "
#    else
#        echo "no occurence of test in $e "
    fi
done

There must be a better way, but none i can think of.

[littlebigman]

Found it: I should have thought about checking the possible switches before asking :-/ Simply add the "l" switch:

'grep -Ril "mypattern" .'

Thank you.