Search string in many files on HP-UX

Question

I need to find which files (they can have space in the filename) of a directory contains a string using only sh and system's commands (Perl is not an option).

For a few files, this command works fine:

# grep -l word *
file 1
file1

But if I have 270k file, I obtain the following error:

#  grep -l word *
sh: /usr/bin/grep: The parameter list is too long.

In HP-UX, the xargs command doesn't have the -0 option, so I can't use this:

# find . -print0 |xargs -0 grep -l
xargs: unknown option: -0

Do you know which command I can use?

Solution 1

You could use a variant of your find command like this:

find . -type f -exec grep -l word {} \; 

Solution 2

If your version of HP-UX is recent enough, you can call find with the -exec … + action. This action does the same job as xargs (call a command on multiple matching files at once, without overflowing the command line length limit), but in a reliable way for any file name.

find . -type f -exec grep -l word {} +

If your version of HP-UX is too old, you might have only -exec … \; and not -exec … +. The ; version calls the command on one file at a time, which is a bit slower.

find . -type f -exec grep -l word {} \;

If your file names don't contain \"' or whitespace, then you can use xargs without the -0 option.

find . -type f -print | xargs grep -l word

Comments

[Gabriel Hautclocq]

You forgot to write the word to search, so this does not answer the problem, so this should not be the best answer unless Mat correct it. @Gilles answer is better and more complete imho.

[Gabriel Hautclocq]

That's better now :-) Still less complete than Gilles answer but works for everyone.