The following simple shell script, lookfor, uses find (17.1) to look for all files in the specified directory hierarchy that have been modified within a certain time, and it passes the resulting names to grep (27.2) to scan for a particular pattern. For example, the command:
%lookfor /work -7 tamale enchilada
would search through the entire /work filesystem and print the names of all files modified within the past week that contain the words "tamale" or "enchilada". (So, for example: if this article is stored on /work, lookfor should find it.)
The arguments to the script are the pathname
of a directory hierarchy to search in ($1
), a time ($2
),
and one or more text patterns (the other arguments).
This simple but slow version will search for an (almost) unlimited number of
words:
#!/bin/sh temp=/tmp/lookfor$$ trap 'rm -f $temp; exit' 0 1 2 15 find $1 -mtime $2 -print > $temp shift; shift for word do grep -i "$word" `cat $temp` /dev/null done
That version runs grep once to search for each word. The -i option makes the search find either uppercase or lowercase letters. Using /dev/null makes sure that grep will print the filename . (13.14) Watch out: the list of filenames may get too long (9.20).
The next version is more limited but faster.
It builds a regular expression for
egrep (27.5)
that finds all the words in one pass through the files.
If you use too many words, egrep will say Regular expression too long
.
Your egrep may not have a -i option; you can just omit it.
This version also uses
xargs (9.21);
though xargs has its
problems (9.22).
#!/bin/sh where="$1" when="$2" shift; shift # Build egrep expression like (word1|word2|...) in $expr for word do case "$expr" in "") expr="($word" ;; *) expr="$expr|$word" ;; esac done expr="$expr)" find $where -mtime $when -print | xargs egrep -i "$expr" /dev/null
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,