How can I grep the results of FIND using -EXEC and still output to a file?

Question

Better to explain on examples.

I can:

find . -name "*.py" -type f > output.txt

But how can I store the output to the same file for:

find . -name "*.py" -type f -exec grep "something" {} \

I can't just do

find . -name "*.py" -type f -exec grep "something" {} \ > output.txt

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly this is what you want to do:

find . -name '*.py' -print0 | xargs -0 grep 'something' > output.txt

Find all files with extension py, grep only rows that contain something and save the rows in output.txt. If the file contains anything it will be replaced.

Edit: Using -exec:

find . -name '*.py' -exec grep 'something' {} \; > output.txt

Answer 2

If you want to save all the matching lines across all files in output.txt, your last command does work, except that you're missing the required ; at the end of the command.

find . -name "*.py" -type f -exec grep "something" {} \; > output.txt

If you want each run of grep to produce output to a different file, run a shell to compute the output file name and perform the redirection.

find . -name "*.py" -type f -exec sh -c 'grep "something" <"$0" >"$0.txt"' {} \;

Answer 3

Use tee:

find . -name '*.py' | tee output.txt | xargs grep 'something'

The caveat, is if you have any files with special characters (including spaces) that xargs and grep won't work well with (a file.txt will be interpreted as two files, a and file.txt). The alternative to that is to use either the -x or -print0, but either of those will pollute your output.txt. The -x will use \ to escape certain special characters and this will be in output.txt. The -print0 will use a null byte as a field separator (which also requires xargs -0) and output.txt will look like one long contiguous line of text.

How you deal (or don't) with this is up to you.