To recursively search with grep

grautu · 11-19-2005, 05:13 PM

To put grep search a certain pattern (say chroot) on the entire partition / I use (as root) the following command

Code:

# grep -r chroot /

Consequently I get the answer

Code:

Binary file /bin/su matches
Binary file /bin/login matches
_

where "_" is a blinking cursor. That is the system hangs and cannot be restarted but with brutal keystrokes (such as ctrl+alt+del etc). I guess that happens due to some special files which grep cannot read. Could you please help me to adapt the grep command to search a certain pattern (say string) within "usual" files (say nonexecutable, non-symlinks, non-?) and throughout the root partition / ?
Thanks!

uselpa · 11-19-2005, 05:33 PM

find and xargs are your friend, like:

Code:

find / -type f | xargs grep chroot

try "man find" to see all the options.

Slim Backwater · 11-19-2005, 08:35 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by uselpa
find and xargs are your friend, like:

Code:

find / -type f | xargs grep chroot

try "man find" to see all the options.

I just want to add one thing. That will apparently break if any of your filenames have carriage returns in them, and is the reason why the find -print0 and the xargs -0 parameters were created.

Code:

find / -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep chroot

grautu · 11-20-2005, 04:31 AM

Thanks a lot uselpa and Slim Backwater for your help!

gbonvehi · 11-20-2005, 12:33 PM

You could also use grep's -I option which will skip binary files. Like: grep -I -r /

loonix · 11-21-2005, 02:53 AM

On all pc's i have access to I add the following bash script I whipped up. Short, simple and REAL handy.

Code:

#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -eq 0 ]
then
        echo "Usage: search [-l] string"
else
        find . -name "*" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep $1 $2
fi

The optional -l flag is the standard grep -l flag. Just return the filenames or return the matches aswell as the filenames

Regards

Mick Pollard
aka lunix-aus
http://www.lunix.com.au