Recursive grep fails for *.c files
I suggest to use the --include
option of grep
:
grep -lr --include='*.c' search-pattern .
The *.c
pattern is evaluated by your shell. It applies to the current directory, just like you would using ls *.c
.
I think what you want instead is to find all files matching the *.c
pattern (recursively) and have grep
search for you in it. Here's a way to do that:
find . -name "*.c" -print0 | xargs --null grep -l search-pattern
It uses xargs
to append the search results by find
.
Alternatively, use the -exec
option to find, e.g.:
find . -name "*.c" -exec grep -l search-pattern "{}" \;
Also, I'm not sure if you really want the -l
option to grep
. It will stop at the first match:
-l, --files-with-matches
Suppress normal output; instead print the name of each
input file from which output would normally have been
printed. The scanning will stop on the first match.
(-l is specified by POSIX.)