Re: grep FILE spec

[Paul Jarc]

Edward Dunkle <address@hidden> wrote:
>  grep -n -r -e ProductType *.java
> gives grep: *.java: No such file or directorywhen the current directory
> holds no .java file, but they DO exist farther down the file structure

Wildcards are expanded by the shell before grep sees them.  The shell
doesn't know what grep's -r option means, so "*" becomes a list of
files in the current directory.  You could quote the "*" to prevent
the shell from substituting it, but that wouldn't help because grep
would look for a file or directory called "*".  grep doesn't know how
to expand wildcards; that's the shell's job.

> So how do you get it to look through all directories (recurse) but only
> match on certain files (*.java)?

man find
man xargs
find . -name '*.java' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -n -e ProductType /dev/null


paul