Re: recursive grep and openoffice

[Ken Irving <fnkci@uaf.edu>]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 11:19:20AM -0500, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
> In <[🔎] 1f1816a90903180556k56e3e592qa14c55d1c3193026@mail.gmail.com>, John O 
> Laoi wrote:
> >With respect to the command line, I have fixed on
> >
> > find . -name *.odt -exec sh -c 'unzip -c "{}" content.xml | grep
> >"string-being sought" > /dev/null' \; -print
> 
> I think I'd rewrite it as:
> find . \
> -name '*.odt' \
> -exec sh -c 'unzip -c "$1" content.xml | grep -q regex' \{} \; \
> -print
> 
> I'm not sure what the rules are for find substituting "{}" within another 
> argument, so it seems best to write it as a separate argument.  If you have 
> anything that matches *.odt in the current directory, the find won't work[1] 
> unless you quote it.  You might also need to throw double-quotes around the 
> regex, depending on its contents. 
> ...
> 
> [1] It may work, but it won't actually be searching for files with names 
> matching the glob *.odt.
 
It _may_ also work if unquoted, since bash will leave the literal *
as is if there's no match in the current directory, and so find will
see it as intended.  I guess that's a good thing, but it can be 
confusing.

Bash will also leave {} untouched since it doesn't expand to anything, so
I don't see any point in quoting it as shown.

Ken
-- 
Ken Irving