to be a little more explicit and to throw an extra trick in your bag, I usually write tihs up (in scripts, not typically on the command line) as: find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 egrep 'want | phrase' /dev/null why the /dev/null? grep will only prepend the filename in the output if there's more than 1 file. This guarantees that you'll always have at least 2 files. imho, the grep -r option does not belong. but maybe I'm being an old unix codger. There's plenty of existing ways to do it. I don't see the benefit to -r. It's less flexible than find. - Kevin On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 20:43:10 +0200, Alexander Dalloz <alexander.dalloz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Am Mi, den 11.08.2004 schrieb Kevin Old um 20:31: > > > I've been using > > find . -exec grep "phrase I want" {} \; > > Not the best way. Using -exec is problematic. > > > for quite a while to search recursively through directories and files > > to find a phrase or word. > > > > The results I get back are simply the line(s) that contained the > > phrase, but no path or filename. > > find . -print0 | xargs -0 grep "string" > > > I'd thought about the -name flag, but I can't seem to figure out how > > to use it, though it is more for using to search for file names rather > > than display the name, it seems. > > find /path/to/search/under -name "*string*" > > will find all object names with "string" anywhere in, like "stringfoo" > or "foostringbar" or just "string". > > > Kevin > > Alexander > > -- > Alexander Dalloz | Enger, Germany | GPG key 1024D/ED695653 1999-07-13 > Fedora GNU/Linux Core 2 (Tettnang) kernel 2.6.7-1.494.2.2smp > Serendipity 20:40:56 up 7 days, 14:08, load average: 4.07, 3.31, 2.20 > > >