Re: grep.... I know I am new to ubuntu but....

[Bob Proulx]

John Cowan wrote:
> I'm aware of this extension to classic find syntax.  However, I still
> like to use xargs because it allows pipelines to be generalized like this:
> 
>     find some/path | grep 'some.*regex' | xargs -d'\n' grep 'some-string'
> ...
> grep exactly those files.  This allows searches which can't easily be
> expressed by arguments to 'find', ...

I admit that it is a rather nice paradign.  And again I never use
whitespace in filenames so it always works perfectly for me.

But now I have to point out the GNU find -regex option. :-)

  find some/path -regexp 'some.*regex' -exec grep 'some-string' {} +

The only gotcha is that the regular expression must match the entire
pathname.  It is anchored on both ends.  So use of .* is usually normal.

But of course -regex is an extension and so isn't portable everywhere.

Bob