lookfor: Which File Has That Word? (Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition) 9.22. lookfor: Which File Has That Word? The following simple shell script, lookfor, uses find to look for all files in the specified directory hierarchy that have been modified within a certain time, and it passes the resulting names to grep to scan for a particular pattern. For example, the command: % lookfor /work -7 tamale enchilada would search through the entire /work filesystem and print the names of all files modified within the past week that contain the words "tamale" or "enchilada." (For example, if this article is stored in /work, lookfor should find it.) The arguments to the script are the pathname of a directory hierarchy to search in ($1), a time ($2), and one or more text patterns (the other arguments). This simple but slow version will search for an (almost) unlimited number of words: #!/bin/sh temp=/tmp/lookfor$$ trap 'rm -f $temp; exit' 0 1 2 15 find $1 -mtime $2 -print > $temp shift; shift for word do grep -i "$word" `cat $temp` /dev/null done That version runs grep once to search for each word. The -i option makes the search find either upper- or lowercase letters. Using /dev/null makes sure that grep will print the filename. Watch out, though: the list of filenames may get too long. The next version is more limited but faster. It builds a regular expression for egrep that finds all the words in one pass through the files. If you use too many words, egrep will say Regular expression too long. Also, your egrep may not have a -i option; you can just omit it. This version also uses xargs; though xargs has its problems. #!/bin/sh where="$1" when="$2" shift; shift # Build egrep expression like (word1|word2|...) in $expr for word do case "$expr" in "") expr="($word" ;; *) expr="$expr|$word" ;; esac done expr="$expr)" find $where -mtime $when -print | xargs egrep -i "$expr" /dev/null --JP and TOR 9.21. grepping a Directory Tree9.23. Using Shell Arrays to Browse Directories Copyright © 2003 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved.