Right now I do this a lot:
find * | grep py$ | xargs grep foo
I recall there is some util that does this with way less typing, but which?
UPDATE: I prefer to use the Bash shell if possible.
views:
496answers:
8
+4
A:
You may find your shell helps you. For instance, in zsh, you can do
grep foo **/*.py
provided the number of .py files doesn't exceed the maximum number of arguments allowed for a command (64k?). Note you can qualify the file globbing e.g.
grep foo **/*.py(mh-5)
which will give you everything modified in the last 5 hours.
Brian Agnew
2009-06-22 16:21:37
not any better, almost the same # of keystrokes;
Jay Stevens
2009-06-22 16:26:16
Hence the zsh globbing
Brian Agnew
2009-06-22 16:27:30
Tip: end your exec expression with a '+' instead of ';', which will make find send all matching files to a single grep process instead of forking off a new one for each matching file. Much more efficient that way.
Lars Haugseth
2009-06-22 17:13:38
+2
A:
zsh has recursive globbing, so you can do
grep foo **/*.py
Look ma, no find :)
UPDATE: Oh, also if you do something a lot it doesn't hurt to alias or write a function for it of course
Eric Wendelin
2009-06-22 16:25:00
Given zsh's ability to do this, I barely have to mess with find's arcane syntax
Brian Agnew
2009-06-22 16:26:14
+2
A:
It's called grep *wink* :-)
All py in current directory
grep -R foo *.py
All files in current and any sub-directory
grep -R foo .
jitter
2009-06-22 16:25:37
+1: -R is standard on most UNIX commands to also scan subdirectories recursively.
R. Bemrose
2009-06-22 16:27:10
Don't you need to quote or escape your globbing ? Otherwise the shell will expand this in the current directory ?
Brian Agnew
2009-06-22 16:28:30
A:
I use something very much like your find/grep pair a lot, although with even more conditions -- excluding files in .svn directories, for example. I do this so much I just made scripts around these invocations, so I can call "src-grep ..." and have it do basically what you're doing here. (Then I added an optional extension for a number of context lines to pass to the grep -C flag, if supplied, and a separate version to grep the results for definition statements.)
This is more useful and faster than recursive grep for me.
khedron
2009-07-09 00:38:56