find: Contents
2.9 Contents
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To search for files based on their contents, you can use the 'grep'
program. For example, to find out which C source files in the current
directory contain the string 'thing', you can do:
grep -l thing *.[ch]
If you also want to search for the string in files in subdirectories,
you can combine 'grep' with 'find' and 'xargs', like this:
find . -name '*.[ch]' | xargs grep -l thing
The '-l' option causes 'grep' to print only the names of files that
contain the string, rather than the lines that contain it. The string
argument ('thing') is actually a regular expression, so it can contain
metacharacters. This method can be refined a little by using the '-r'
option to make 'xargs' not run 'grep' if 'find' produces no output, and
using the 'find' action '-print0' and the 'xargs' option '-0' to avoid
misinterpreting files whose names contain spaces:
find . -name '*.[ch]' -print0 | xargs -r -0 grep -l thing
For a fuller treatment of finding files whose contents match a
pattern, see the manual page for 'grep'.
Info Catalog
find: Mode Bits
find: Finding Files
find: Directories