Why does my shell script not find anything (find . -name script.sh | grep watermelon)

Question

I have a script that I'm running from the home directory to search for all files called "script.sh" that contain the string "watermelon". It's not finding anything but I can clearly see these scripts in the subdirectories. Could someone please suggest a change to the command I'm using:

find . -name script.sh | grep watermelon

Answer 1

You need to use xargs:

find . -name script.sh | xargs grep watermelon

xargs will modify the behavior to search within the files, rather than just search within the names of the files.

Answer 2

find returns the filename it finds by default. If you want it to search within the files then you need to pipe it to xargs or use the -exec and -print predicates:

find . -name script.sh -exec grep -q watermelon {} \; -print

Answer 3

use -type f to indicate file

find . -type f -name "script.sh" -exec grep "watermelon" "{}" +;

or if you have bash 4

shopt -s globstar
grep -Rl "watermelon" **/script.sh