How to pipe list of files returned by find command to cat to view all the files

Question

I am doing a find and then getting a list of files  How do I pipe it to another utility like cat  so that cat displays the contents of all those files  and basically need to grep something from these files

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I use something like this   find   -name  lt filename gt  -print0   xargs -0 cat   grep  lt word2search4 gt     -print0  argument for  find  and  -0  argument for  xargs  are needed to handle whitespace in file paths names correctly

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Here is my shot for general use   grep YOURSTRING  find      It will print the file name

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The find command has an -exec argument that you can use for things like this  you could just do the grep directly using that   For example  from here  other good examples at this page    find   -exec grep  www athabasca          -print

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Modern version  POSIX 2008 added the   marker to find which means it now automatically groups as many files as are reasonable into a single command execution  very much like xargs does  but with a number of advantages    You don t have to worry about odd characters in the file names  You don t have to worry about the command being invoked with zero file names    The file name issue is a problem with xargs without the -0 option  and the  run even with zero file names  issue is a problem with or without the -0 option     but GNU xargs has the -r or --no-run-if-empty option to prevent that happening   Also  this notation cuts down on the number of processes  not that you re likely to measure the difference in performance  Hence  you could sensibly write   find   -exec grep something        Classic version  find   -print   xargs grep something   If you re on Linux or have the GNU find and xargs commands  then use -print0 with find and -0 with xargs to handle file names containing spaces and other odd-ball characters   find   -print0   xargs -0 grep something   Tweaking the results from grep  If you don t want the file names  just the text  then add an appropriate option to grep  usually -h to suppressing  headings     To absolutely guarantee the file name is printed by grep  even if only one file is found  or the last invocation of grep is only given 1 file name   then add  dev null to the xargs command line  so that there will always be at least two file names

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Piping to another process  Although this WON T accomplish what you said you are trying to do    command1   command2   This will send the output of command1 as the input of command2 -exec on a find  this will do what you are wanting to do -- but is specific to find   find   -name    foo  -exec cat          Everything between find and -exec are the find predicates you were already using      will substitute the particular file you found into the command  cat    in this case   the    is to end the -exec command   send output of one process as command line arguments to another process  command2  command1    for example   cat  find   -name    foo  -print     Note these are BACK-QUOTES not regular quotes  under the tilde   on my keyboard    This will send the output of command1 into command2 as command line arguments   Note that file names containing spaces  newlines  etc  will be broken into separate arguments  though

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Use ggrep   ggrep -H -R -I  mysearchstring      to search for a file in unix containing text located in the current directory or a subdirectory

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Sounds like a job for a shell script to me   for file in  find -name   xml  do    grep  hello  file done   or something like that

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Are you trying to find text in files   You can simply use grep for that     grep searchterm

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To list and see contents of all abc def files on a server in the directories  ghi and  jkl  find  ghi  jkl -type f -name abc def 2 gt   dev null -exec ls       -exec cat         To list the abc def files which have commented entries and display see those entries in the directories  ghi and  jkl  find  ghi  jkl -type f -name abc def 2 gt   dev null -exec grep -H

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To achieve this  using bash  I would do as follows  cat   find   -name    foo    This is known as the  quot command substitution quot  and it strips line feed by default which is really convinient   more infos here

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There are a few ways to pass the list of files returned by the find command to the cat command  though technically not all use piping  and none actually pipe directly to cat    The simplest is to use backticks       cat  find  whatever     This takes the output of find and effectively places it on the command line of cat  This doesn t work well if find has too much output  more than can fit on a command-line  or if the output has special characters  like spaces   In some shells  including bash  one can use     instead of backticks    cat   find  whatever     This is less portable  but is nestable  Aside from that  it has pretty much the same caveats as backticks  Because running other commands on what was found is a common use for find  find has an -exec action which executes a command for each file it finds   find  whatever  -exec cat         The    is a placeholder for the filename  and the    marks the end of the command  It s possible to have other actions after -exec    This will run cat once for every single file rather than running a single instance of cat passing it multiple filenames which can be inefficient and might not have the behavior you want for some commands  though it s fine for cat   The syntax is also a awkward to type -- you need to escape the semicolon because semicolon is special to the shell  Some versions of find  most notably the GNU version  let you replace   with   to use -exec s append mode to run fewer instances of cat   find  whatever  -exec cat        This will pass multiple filenames to each invocation of cat  which can be more efficient   Note that this is not guaranteed to use a single invocation  however  If the command line would be too long then the arguments are spread across multiple invocations of cat  For cat this is probably not a big deal  but for some other commands this may change the behavior in undesirable ways  On Linux systems  the command line length limit is quite large  so splitting into multiple invocations is quite rare compared to some other OSes  The classic portable approach is to use xargs   find  whatever    xargs cat   xargs runs the command specified  cat  in this case   and adds arguments based on what it reads from stdin  Just like -exec with    this will break up the command-line if necessary  That is  if find produces too much output  it ll run cat multiple times  As mentioned in the section about -exec earlier  there are some commands where this splitting may result in different behavior  Note that using xargs like this has issues with spaces in filenames  as xargs just uses whitespace as a delimiter  The most robust  portable  and efficient method also uses xargs   find  whatever  -print0   xargs -0 cat   The -print0 flag tells find to use  0  null character  delimiters between filenames  and the -0 flag tells xargs to expect these  0 delimiters  This has pretty much identical behavior to the -exec     approach  though is more portable  but unfortunately more verbose

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Here s my way to find file names that contain some content that I m interested in  just a single bash line that nicely handles spaces in filenames too   find   -name    xml   while read i  do grep   lt  xml    i   gt  dev null          0    amp  amp  echo  i  done

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This works for me  find  CACHE     while read line  do     cat   line    grep  something  done

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In bash  the following would be appropriate   find  dir -type f -print0   xargs -0i cat      grep whatever   This will find all files in the  dir directory  and safely pipe the filenames into xargs  which will safely drive grep   Skipping xargs is not a good idea if you have many thousands of files in  dir  cat will break due to excessive argument list length  xargs will sort that all out for you   The -print0 argument to find meshes with the -0 argument to xargs to handle filenames with spaces properly  The -i argument to xargs allows you to insert the filename where required in the cat command line   The brackets are replaced by the filename piped into the cat command from find

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This will print the name and contents of files-only recursively    find   -type f -printf   n n p  n  -exec cat         Edit  Improved version   This will print the name and contents of text  ascii  files-only recursively    find   -type f -exec grep -Iq         -print   xargs awk  FNR  1 print FILENAME      0       One more attempt  find   -type f -exec grep -Iq         -printf   n p   -exec cat

[unix] How to pipe list of files returned by find command to cat to view all the files

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