Trying to do a script that will grep on *.c files using find

[ringo22]

Hi,

Sorry for my numpty questions but here goes:

find ./ -name *.c | xargs grep -n "$1"

Here is what i thought would work to search all directories from ./

but i get the error:

find: paths must precede expression
Usage: find [-H] [-L] [-P] [path...] [expression]

Surely the ./ is preceding the expressions ?

Also, if i do

find . *.c

it prints out all the files and then the *.c ones.

Any ideas ?

Thanks

Ringo

PS Mandrake 10.1

[serz]

Why don't you just use "." instead of "./"? It works that way, doesn't it?

[jim mcnamara]

find . -name \*.c -exec grep -l "my search string" {} \;

[kyku]

A comment to the previous post: the error is probably because *.c gets expanded by shell and the resulting files are passed to find, which doesn't expect any file arguments at its end (roughly speaking). So you have to block shell from expanding (i.e. substituting all c files for *.c) so that this wildcard pattern gets passed to find. My way of doing this would be (btw current directory is default when you omit path, so . or ./ is not necesary):

find -name '*.c' # plus the rest

[ringo22]

find -name '*.c' | xargs grep -n "$1"

Works a treat.

Thanks very much.