Re: Perl and or Grep Help!

in reply to Perl and or Grep Help!

Right, "grep" isn't going to work despite the '-r(ecursive)' switch because you've told it to only look for *.pl files in 'mydirectory/' - and no deeper than that. It's intended to either be used with '*' as the file argument, or a list of the directories that you want to look in. You're failing with "find" because you're not asking "grep" to '-l(ist)' the files it found - and possibly because you're failing to quote the metacharacters (*). Here are a couple of ways to make these work (non-Perl... I know, how horrible, right? :)

# Search all files, then filter out the ones that don't end in '.pl'
grep -Hnr mail *|grep '^[^:]*\.pl:' > results.txt

# Find all .pl files and list the ones that contain 'mail'
find /start_dir -name '*.pl' -exec grep -l mail {} \; > results.txt

# Find all .pl files and show all the lines matching 'mail' as well as
+ the file path
find /start_dir -name '*.pl' -exec grep -n mail {} /dev/null \; > resu
+lts.txt
[download]

The last one is an old Unix trick that's been around for a long time, but it still works quite well.

-- 
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
 -- W. B. Yeats

Comment on Re: Perl and or Grep Help! Download Code

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Re^2: Perl and or Grep Help! by Anonymous Monk on Jan 18, 2011 at 14:56 UTC
Thanks, it worked very well. I could also specify on this one as an example exclusion of directories I don't want it to scan right? `find /start_dir -name '*.pl' -exec grep -n mail {} /dev/null \; > res +u +lts.txt` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Perl and or Grep Help! by Anonymous Monk on Jan 18, 2011 at 15:50 UTC
`find /start_dir -name '*.pl' -exec grep -n mail {} /dev/null \; > results.txt` What is the purpose of the `/dev/null`? I seem to get the exact same results with and without it.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Perl and or Grep Help! by Anonymous Monk on Jan 18, 2011 at 15:19 UTC
I am trying this way, no success yet. `find apps/ac/ -name '*.pl' -type d \( -name dirto_escape -o \) -prune +-o -print -exec grep -n sendmail {} /dev/null \; > apps/ac/grep/resu +lts.txt` [download]	[reply] [d/l]

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