Re: find | egrep

[Enrico Zini <zinie@CS.UniBO.IT>]

On Mon, 11 Oct 1999 zdrysdal@diagnostic.co.nz wrote:

> Not a debian question, moreso a generic Unix question..  I need to be able
> to use find and egrep to scan a directory which has more than 3000 files in
> it.  I read in the manual ie "man egrep" that the lines are limited to 2048
> bytes.  The error i get is "/usr/bin/find: 0403-027 The parameter list is
> too long."  Is there any way i can work around this?

There's more than one way to do it(tm):

find <options> | xargs egrep "pattern"
find <options> | while read a; do egrep "pattern" $a; done
[...]
find <options> -exec egrep "pattern" {} \;

The latter being the preferred one.

Bye! Enrico