Recursive grep with piped input

Question

I'm trying to recursively grep all of the .txt files within a directory:

grep -r --include \*.txt findThisStr .

Unfortunately, the .txt files I'm trying to search have some null characters in them and using the -a or --text flags seems to be causing matches on all the lines in the file. To remedy this, I was hoping to sanitize the input and pipe it through grep (like this), but I'm unsure how to do this recursively, or even if it's possible.

Essentially, I'd like to do something like this, except file would be dynamic:

   cat file | tr -d '\000' | grep -r --include \*.txt findThisStr .

I'm using grep on Windows 7 through the 64-bit MINGW shell.

You must have missed something, if "-a or --text flags seems to be causing matches on all the lines". If you have some sample code and input, we might understand the problem better... — flederwiesel
– flederwiesel, Commented Jan 19, 2016 at 22:40

Dirk Herrmann · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-19 22:39:43Z

1

You can use a loop over all *.txt files:

for i in $(find . -name '*.txt'); do
    cat $i | tr -d '\000' | grep findThisStr
done

answered Jan 19, 2016 at 22:39

Dirk Herrmann

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John · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-19 22:41:42Z

0

find . -name '*.txt' |xargs grep -l findThisStr

Will find the files named .txt and print out the filenames with findThisStr in them. If you have special characters in findThisStr you should escape or quote them.

answered Jan 19, 2016 at 22:41

John

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