Solved grep: unknown directories method

[sprock]

hello,

I want to use grep like this:

find ../../../Src/KERNEL_SRC_7.6.0 -iname '*' -exec grep -H '-ldl' {} \;

to find occurrences of '-ldl' in the config files of a software package. Instead of the expected search result I get the message in the title of this thread, repeated many times. In case it is relevant, I'm using FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE amd64 and zsh.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for any help,
sprock

 

[tobik@]

You need to escape the dash: '\-ldl'. Otherwise grep interprets ldl as options.

Any reason you are using find(1)? You are matching all filenames anyway, so a grep -r would do. It searches through all files and subdirectories of a directory.

grep -r '\-ldl' ../../../Src/KERNEL_SRC_7.6.0

or

find ../../../Src/KERNEL_SRC_7.6.0 -iname '*' -exec grep -H '\-ldl' {} \;

 

[kpa]

The difference is in performance. Using find(1) combined with -exec ... {} \+ is much faster than telling grep(1) to do the recursion itself.

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/...cated-starting-1st-of-july.47035/#post-263266

 

[sprock]

You need to escape the dash: '\-ldl'. Otherwise grep interprets ldl as options.

Any reason you are using find(1)? You are matching all filenames anyway, so a grep -r would do. It searches through all files and subdirectories of a directory.

grep -r '\-ldl' ../../../Src/KERNEL_SRC_7.6.0

or

find ../../../Src/KERNEL_SRC_7.6.0 -iname '*' -exec grep -H '\-ldl' {} \;

Many thanks, I was sure I had tried escaping the '-'. The real find command is more complex, I tested, and wanted to ask, with a simpler version.

sprock

 

[SirDice]

You may want to add -type f to have it only work on files.