[NTLUG:Discuss] scratching head

[Fred James]

Carl Haddick wrote:

>OK, I'll bite.
>
>The signature with the pipelined commands - shooting from the hip, I
>would say this finds 'normal files', characterizes them with 'file',
>takes the text types and cuts the file name out of the 'file' command's
>output, and then greps them for "...".
>
>In other words, type all lines in all text files that contain at least
>three arbitrary characters, skipping lines that are 0, 1, or 2
>characters in length.
>
>Did I get it right? Do I win anything?
>
>:-)
>
>Carl
>
>  
>
>>-- 
>>find . -type f | xargs file | grep -i text | cut -f1 -d: | xargs grep "..."
>>
>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>https://ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>
>>    
>>
>
>  
>
Very close - the "..." in this case just means any string of characters 
that you want to search for, though I admit that isn't standard 
notation.  For example:
find . -type f | xargs file | grep -i text | cut -f1 -d: | xargs grep 
"hello"
would look for the string hello in each text file found in the path 
beginning at . (dot) - as a side note, experience has shown me that on 
certain system you may want to include something like "grep -v proc" 
(this seems to be system dependent), especially if you start at / in 
your search, to avoid getting hung up in some endless mess.  Maybe 
someone could shed some light on that?

-- 
find . -type f | xargs file | grep -i text | cut -f1 -d: | xargs grep "..."