Recursion with grep?

[Matthew Hunt]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2003 at 05:37:39PM -0500, Francisco Reyes wrote:

> The man page for grep says to use "-r" to recurse, yet when I try
> something like
> 
> grep -r -li string *.c
> 
> I get no files. However, if I go into one of the subdirectories and do a
> plain grep <string> *.c then <string> is found on several files.

When using "-r", the arguments to grep should be directories.  It will
process all of the files in the given directories, recursively.  There is
no provision for searching a subset of the files (i.e. "*.c).  If you
need to do that, use find and xargs.

-- 
Matthew Hunt <mph at astro.caltech.edu> * UNIX is a lever for the
http://www.pobox.com/~mph/           * intellect. -J.R. Mashey