Hi, is it possible to search through the entire file system or directory to look for content in a file? For instance I wanted to look up the name Joe Smoe in the /etc/passwd file but I don't know the string is in the /etc/passwd file can I issue a find to search through all files on the system looking for the string "Joe Smoe" within all files? I don't want file names but contents of the file.

Thnaks

Yes, the grep command does that. Something like:

grep smoe /home/user/*

see:
man grep

---------------
Steve Stites

Thanks for the fast reply jailbat. I always thought you needed to cat a file before you can grep, and I always associated the find command to searching for contents in a file. Thanks for the help.

If you find yourself using `cat' with only one argument you're
pretty much certainly abusing it. `cat' is short for conCATenate,
it's a tool that allows you to glue several files output together.

`cat oneFile | some other command' is pretty much always unnecessary,
commonly a `some other command oneFile' will do, sometimes you may
need to use a `some other command < oneFile' ...

In fact, in the case of grep you're depriving yourself of a great
lot of greps options, pertaining to the use or suppression of the
files name, for example.

When you want to know which files under /etc have the word shmoe in
them, but don't want to necessarily see the line, what you do is
a
which you couldn't if you cat'ed the content of the files.


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks Tink, I'll take your advice to heart I have always been using cat | grep from now on I'll just stick to grep somefile.