Re: Search for string in files

Johannes Tax wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to figure out how to find a certain string inside a bunch of
> files. If I, for examples, look for a certain function in a large source
> tree, I could do
>
> cat `find . -name '*.c'` | grep 'a_certain_function'
>
> but this seems quite awkward, furthermore it doesn't help that much
> because I don't know in which file the string was found. Maybe there's a
> tool that makes it possible to find a string in a bunch of files and
> also to list in which file the string was found? Or any modification to
> the command given above?

I wrote a perl script that does this (and other stuff) - it's called 'deep' and available on my website:

http://www.neilgunton.com/doc/deep

In your example, you'd just do this:

shell> deep find 'a_certain_function'

And it tells you the file and line numbers where the matches were found. As the name implies, the script recurses on directories automatically. There are other features like replace, delete, do (cmd), etc.

/Neil

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