grep -e 'pattern' -r

Albright — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:17:01 +0000

grep -e 'pattern' -r directory

…always works for me. I use it several times a day.

If -r is really an illegal option for your grep for some reason, try:

grep -e 'pattern' -d recurse

If that still doesn't work, time for good ol' man grep. Its man page is pretty monstrous, but if you search around for "recursively," you ought to find a solution.

The command works on my

pr0gr4mm3r — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:35:20 +0000

The command works on my CentOS (Redhat-based) server, and my Ubuntu (Debian-based) desktop. Not sure why it wouldn't work on yours, and the linked article doesn't mention any compatible problems.

That's what I thought but it

Megan — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:29:00 +0000

That's what I thought but it doesn't work either, says that -r is an illegal option.

pr0gr4mm3r - it's an apache/linux server. Not sure the details on that though. I've had some other weird problems with command line tools on it though so maybe I should bug the sys admins...

Edit: server admin told me this is on Solaris, which doesn't have the same kind of tools as Gnu/linux

What system is this on?

pr0gr4mm3r — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:51:38 +0000

What system is this on?

Can't you just tack on a -r

teammatt3 — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:37:36 +0000

Can't you just tack on a -r to grep recursively?

When I do that it

Megan — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:06:29 +0000

When I do that it says:

find: bad option -print0
find: path-list predicate-list
xargs: illegal option -- 0

This should do it: find

pr0gr4mm3r — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:20:23 +0000

This should do it:

find /home/user/public_html/ -name "*".php -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep "detect_flash.js" | uniq -c | sort -u | cut -d":" -f1

Just replace /home/user/pulic_html/ with the path to search. I came across this command when searching for malicious scripts. More information can be found at this article.