On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 2:41 AM, Ralph Angenendt <ra+centos at br-online.de> wrote: > Akemi Yagi wrote: >> >> Sorry, I missed the "!" in the above paste: >> >> find . -type f -exec grep -il \!* {} \; -exec grep -i \!* {} \; -exec echo \; > > If you are using GNU grep (well, you are using CentOS), > > grep -ri "foo" dir/to/search/in > > seems much shorter to me. > This works unless you are looking to search a specific set of files by name, not just whole directories. I routinely use searches like this to locate patterns in build trees, but I typically only want to look in header or c source files (or sometimes just the Makefiles. In my case, the find...grep form works better because there may not be any of the files I want in the directory from which I begin the search, only those farther down. Cheers. mhr