up vote 286 down vote favorite
101

I'd like to find the files in the current directory that contain the text "chrome".

$ find . -exec grep chrome
find: missing argument to `-exec'

What am I doing wrong?

share|improve this question
    
Related: unix.stackexchange.com/q/321697/135943 – Wildcard Nov 10 '16 at 1:46
    
I got find: Only one instance of {} is supported with -exec ... + – Costa Apr 3 '17 at 19:36
up vote 421 down vote accepted

You missed a ; or a + and a {}:

find . -exec grep chrome {} \;

or

find . -exec grep chrome {} +

find will execute grep and will substitute {} with the filename(s) found. The difference between ; and + is that with ; a single grep command for each file is executed whereas with + as many files as possible are given as parameters to grep at once.

share|improve this answer
19  
If you use the \; ending construct grep is passed one file at a time, so it doesn't display the file name by default, only the matched lines. To get a file list instead add use grep -ls inside of the find construct. – Caleb May 10 '11 at 6:55
6  
find . -exec grep foo {} + will show you output like this ./dir/file.py:from foo import bar – s g Apr 17 '15 at 20:30
7  
find . -exec grep foo {} \; will show you output like this from foo import bar – s g Apr 17 '15 at 20:31
6  
find . -exec grep -l foo {} + will show you output like this ./dir/file.py – s g Apr 17 '15 at 20:32
5  
find . -exec grep -l foo {} \; will show you output like this ./dir/file.py – s g Apr 17 '15 at 20:33
up vote 34 down vote

You don't need to use find for this at all; grep is able to handle opening the files either from a glob list of everything in the current directory:

grep chrome *

...or even recursively for folder and everything under it:

grep chrome . -R
share|improve this answer
14  
grep will choke if the expansion goes over ARG_MAX. -R will visit everything while using find one can more easily add primitives to exclude certain files (-name, etc) or not even visit subtrees (-prune). – Mel May 9 '11 at 23:58
4  
Good points @Mel. My point was that in all likelihood the asking party was making things more complex than they needed to be by introducing find when grep could do the job, but in some cases it would be more effective to to use find to fine tine the file list before going out to grep. – Caleb May 10 '11 at 6:53
3  
@Mel grep does not choke in such a case, exec does. – Chris Down Mar 26 '13 at 6:21
up vote 11 down vote 
find . | xargs grep 'chrome'

you can also do:

find . | xargs grep 'chrome' -ls

The first shows you the lines in the files, the second just lists the files.

Caleb's option is neater, fewer keystrokes.

share|improve this answer
10  
The problem with xargs is that it expects its input to be quoted in a peculiar way that find doesn't produce. So find … | xargs … doesn't work if you have file names containing whitespace or \'". – Gilles May 10 '11 at 6:31
1  
@Gilles You can get around that problem by using something like find . | xargs -n1 -iX grep "X" 'chrome' so that arguments are fed one at a time and quoted. Obviously this is a horribly inefficient way to handle this example, but for some situations it's nice. – Caleb May 10 '11 at 11:56
    
For completeness we should also mention the -i option for case insensitivity with 'grep'. Also there is -iname in find for case insensitivity. – Mathew May 10 '11 at 12:01
6  
@Caleb: The only 100% reliable way to have xargs cope with Linux filenames is find ... -print0 | xargs -0, using NUL as separator. Alternative - xargs -d '\n' using newline as separator, 99% reliability. – grawity May 10 '11 at 20:18
    
I use this often, but it will fail for very long lists of filenames, at which point find -exec becomes the winner. – Spacemoose Jul 5 '15 at 9:08
up vote 4 down vote

Find is one way and you can try the_silver_searcher then all you need to do is 

ag chrome

It will search chrome in all files (include sub directories) and it is faster than find

share|improve this answer
up vote 1 down vote

To see list of files instead of lines:

grep -l "chrome" *

or:

grep -r -l "chrome" .
share|improve this answer
up vote 1 down vote

Here's an example of how I usually use find/exec...

find  . -name "*.py" -print -exec fgrep hello {} \;

This searches recursively for all .py files, and for each file print(s) out the filename and fgrep's for 'hello' on that (for each) file. Output looks like (just ran one today):

./r1.py
./cgi-bin/tst1.py
print "hello"
./app/__init__.py
./app/views.py
./app/flask1.py
./run.py
./tst2.py
print "hello again"
share|improve this answer
    
not to mess with your workflow, but you might like: find . -name "*.py" -exec fgrep -l hello {} \; -- it'll print the filenames of files that match, and nothing else – Jeff Schaller Aug 23 '17 at 16:19

protected by Anthon Sep 24 '17 at 14:58

Thank you for your interest in this question. Because it has attracted low-quality or spam answers that had to be removed, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count).

Would you like to answer one of these unanswered questions instead?

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.