Using Find output and making a grep on it

Some times, we may be in situation to find the list of files in a recursive directory and search for a specific contents in it.

Below is the command which does that. In below command I'm trying to find commons-beanutils.jar recursive in a directory and a grep command on the listed files to actually find do the jar files has class file 'BeanUtilsBean.class in it.

find . -name *beanutils*.jar -exec grep 'BeanUtilsBean.class' '{}' \;

To touch a folder contents recursive

Some times you may need to alter the access date of files and folder. You can do it by a recursive touch command.

find . | xargs touch

Find and Grep

The find and grep are very usefull commands for development.

When you want to grep a content for the matching files, below commands will help you out.


In linux:
find /tmp -name 'page.xml' -print0 | xargs -0 grep "view_link=\"ReportView" | awk '{print $1}' | wc -l

In solaris:
find /tmp -name 'page.xml' -exec grep "view_link=\"ReportView" {} \; | wc -l

In the above command I'm trying to find page.xml inside /tmp dir and then search content "view_link=\"ReportView" from the find output.