Is there a simpler way to grep all files under a directory?

Check if your grep supports -r option (for recurse):

grep -r <search_string> .

If you want to recurse down into subdirectories:

grep -R 'pattern' .

The -R option is not a standard option, but is supported by most common grep implementations.

A sub optimal answer : Instead of piping the output of find into grep, you could just run

find . -type f -exec grep 'research' {} '+'

and voila, one command instead of two !

explanation :

find . -type f

find all regular files within .

-exec grep 'research'

grep 'research'

{}

in found filename

'+'

use one command per all the filenames, not once per filename.

Nb : with ';' it would have been once per filename.

Other than that, if you use that to process source code, you may look into ack, which is made for looking for code bits easily.

ack

Edit :

You can extend that research a little. First, you can use the -name '' switch of find to look for files with specifig naming pattern.

For instance :

only files that correspond to logs : -name '*.log'
only files that correspond to c headers, but you can't stick with uppercase or lowercase for your filename extensions : -iname *.c

Nb : like for grep and ack, the -i switch means case insensitive in this case.

In that case, grep will show without color and without line numbers.

You can change that with the --color and the -n switches (Color and lines numbers in files respectively).

In the end, you can have something like :

find . -name '*.log' -type f -exec grep --color -n 'pattern' {} '+'

for instance

$ find . -name '*.c' -type f -exec grep -n 'hello' {} '+' 
./test2/target.c:1:hello

Related