Limiting how deep in file grep searches

Clutch2 · 02-25-2008, 08:35 PM

I found some thing that runs in under 30 seconds vs the 11 minute brute force straight grep.

$ find . -mtime 1 -print | xargs grep -i -C10 'SearchString'

Thanks to all,

Clutch

Tinkster · 02-25-2008, 09:10 PM

Btw, you might be able to speed this up some more by adding a -l flag
to grep instead of the context (which shouldn't help much with performance).
While this will only output the file-name rather than the match it will also
stop on the first match rather than carrying on to search the same file.

Cheers,
Tink

Clutch2 · 02-26-2008, 03:35 AM

Had time to learn one more thing, since I wanted to search the last 7 days of files I needed to use -7 for mtime or I only get 1 day of files feed to grep.

One day 7x24 hrs ago
$ find . -mtime 7 -print | xargs grep -i -C10 'SearchString'

All days since 7x24 hrs ago
$ find . -mtime -7 -print | xargs grep -i -C10 'SearchString'

Now I think I have it.

Clutch