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
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
I'm incorporating Chris Downs comment here. The above command will result in grep being executed as many times as find finds occurences. However, if you replace the ; with a +, grep is called with the output from find concatenated (up to a certain limit). See question Using semicolon (;) vs plus (+) with exec in find for more on the subject.
+ instead of \;, it will improve execution time significantly (since it will contatenate arguments prior to execution until ARG_MAX).
– Chris Down
Nov 6 '11 at 14:31
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"' {} \;
find . -name "*.py" -type f -exec grep "something" {} \; -print > output.txt And if you'd like to see the line numbers of the grep'ed lines you can, of course, use grep -n "something"
– JJMpls
Jul 24 '14 at 2:27
For the record, grep has --include and --exclude arguments that you can use to filter the files it searches:
grep -r --include="*.py" "something" > output.txt
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.
