Grep (underscore?) Problem

[Bigus]

Hi All

I'm having a problem grep'ing files for a certain string on my server. The command I'm using is:

find . -name "*.php" -o -name "*.pl" -o -name "*.cgi" -o -name "*.pm" -o -name "*.xml" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -il "db_name"

So, as you can see, I want to search all php|pl|cgi|pm|xml files under the current directory tree and list the path/filenames that contain the string "db_name".

I've been using this command format for other strings successfully, but I suspect the underscore is throwing this one out as no matches are returned even though I know there is at least one file containing that string.

I've tried enclosing the string in single quotes instead of double, escaping the underscore with a backslash and replacing the underscore with a full stop (regular expression style) but to no avail.

I haven't found any answers yet by googling, so I wonder if someone here can quell my frustration? Please go easy on me though, as I have limited grasp of Linux in general.

Thanks
Bigus

[Ziplock]

I can't see any reason why the grep wouldn't work. I gather you have tried just the grep command on a test file that definitely contains the string you are looking for? If the grep works on a test file, then it isn't finding the string

[Bigus]

Yes, regular grep'ing works.. I've kind of found what the problem was. That is, if I remove the '-print0' and '-0' it does find 'db_name' in all the files, so this works:

find . -name "*.php" -o -name "*.pl" -o -name "*.cgi" -o -name "*.pm" -o -name "*.xml" | xargs grep -il "db_name"

Trouble is, in amongst the list of files found, I get lines like this:

grep: example/gallery1/gallery.xml: No such file or directory

I gather '-print0' and '-0' are something to do with dir/file names with spaces in but I can't imagine why they would be affecting finding the string inside the files.

Is there another way of finding files with reliable results?

[Ziplock]

OK, this is a problem with filenames/directories with spaces in them.

The workaround in this instance is, instead of piping you find output to xargs, use the exec flag on the find command:

 find ... -exec grep -il 'db_name' '{}' ';'

Using the quotes around the {} identifier should nullify those spaces for you.

[Bigus]

Thanks for your continued assistance, however that didn't work, i.e this came up with no matches:

find . -name "*.php" -o -name "*.pl" -o -name "*.cgi" -o -name "*.pm" -o -name "*.xml" -exec grep -il 'db_name' '{}' ';'

However, these *did*:

find . -name "*.php" -exec grep -il 'db_name' '{}' ';'
find . -name "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -il "db_name"

Therefore it looks like it's the multiple files types / -o that caused both different search methods to fail.

Is there another way of specifying multiple files types, or maybe there's some kind of grouping syntax for the "-name xx -o -name xxx" block?

[weasy]

Not to be a complete idiot but how on earth did I not know
about the -a switch?
LoL I have been using find -type d -exec grep "find-this" {} ;\ forever

[Ziplock]

OK, so the following is an alternative to the long string of -o -name options:

find . -iregex '.*php$\|.*cgi$' -exec grep -il 'db_name' '{}' ';'

Add more extensions with the \| between them as required.

[Bigus]

YES! That works!

It kinda feels like I've just climbed a mountain to get to a solution for this simple task, albeit Ziplock has pulled me up there!

Many thanks for your help Zip

Regards
Bigus

[Ziplock]

Glad I could help Bigus! Find is useful and flexible, but complicated too