CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashshell
David Lam
David Lam

Reputation: 4948

is there a shell / bash way to alias... find . -type f -exec grep -l <some word here> {} \;;

basically, this command does a recursive grep through all files in all sub-directories and I use it ALOT

but it's looooong and takes awhile to type

so I was wondering if instead of...

$ find . -type f -exec grep -l <some word here> {} \;;

that there was a way to alias it or something in my .bashrc so that I could just do something like... 

$ findrecursive <some word here>

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2409

Answers (4)

EntangledLoops
EntangledLoops

Reputation: 2119

For whatever reason, these solutions didn't work for me in LUbuntu using bash in LXTerminal. I added the following to my ~/.bash_aliases:

function find_helper() { /usr/bin/find . -iname "$@" -readable -prune -print; }
alias find='find_helper'

And I now have the behavior I expected. For example:

find *.xml

Searches recursively from pwd filtering out the Permission Denied messages.

Upvotes: 1

Jite
Jite

Reputation: 4368

I just assume you use Linux and GNU tools, I don't know if it's a GNU extension, but otherwise the snippet below should do what you want, quick and easy:

grep -r <search-regexp>

The above doesn't follow symlinks, if you want your search to do that you need:

grep -R <search-regexp>

In some distros there is an rgrep command which I just think is an alias to grep -r. If you don't have it just do alias rgrep="grep -r" and put it in your .bashrc or equivalent.

Upvotes: 7

ron rothman
ron rothman

Reputation: 18138

Sure. In bash:

function findrecursive() { find . -type f -exec grep -l "$1" {} \;; }

And then call it like this:

findrecursive "hello"

Upvotes: 4

mjgpy3
mjgpy3

Reputation: 8937

You can always make it into a shell script and put it into one of your bins. For example:

#!/bin/bash
# findrecursive.sh

find . -type f -exec grep -l "$1" {} \;;

Then, after you have made it executable (e.g. chmod and put in a path directory somewhere (e.g. /bin) you can call it by saying:

findrecursive.sh <some word here>

Of course you don't need the .sh extension, it's only a convention for sorting. And you may want to note that the $1 will become <some word here> when you call the script.

Upvotes: 1

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