Find | grep doesn't work in Cygwin

Question

I have cygwin installed and when I search for the source code with this command nothing show up, even that I have that string in a file

$ echo foo > bar
$ find . -name '*' | grep foo

Nothing shows up. This command works fine on GNU+Linux.

$ grep foo bar

Answer 1

As mentioned, find outputs a list of found files to stdout, grep normally expects to search through stdout if called this way.

Could also pipe find to xargs, and it will "build and execute command lines from standard input", as in

$ find . | xargs grep foo

If you have crazy filenames, with newlines and whatnot, then this would be better:

$ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep foo

and the -type f will only find regular files, so no attempts to grep through any . or .. or any directories or "funny" files.

Answer 2

find . -name  '*' # This will produce a list of *file names*

You then pass your list of filenames to grep on stdin, it treats the list as text and searches for foo

You have no file name of foo so it returns nothing.

To search recursively through files looking for text in a file you can simply use

grep -R foo somefolder/

Answer 3

When I search for the source code with this command nothing shows up

$ echo foo > bar
$ find . -name '*' | grep foo

find searches for filenames that meet a desired criteria: Name, Size, File Type and returns a list of matching filenames. It doesn't return the contents of the matching files.

When that list of filenames is passed to grep using the pipe operator grep will see the string bar (the filename) and not foo (the contents of file bar).

grep therefore doesn't find a match so has nothing to output.

Note:

• grep can search files directly. You don't need to use find. pipes |, or xargs as suggested in another answer.

The following command works on Cygwin:

grep --exclude-dir=* "foo" ./*

Example:

DavidPostill@Hal /f/test
$ cat bar
foo

DavidPostill@Hal /f/test
$ grep --exclude-dir=* "foo" ./*
./bar:foo

---

Further Reading

• An A-Z Index of the Bash command line for Linux - An excellent reference for all things Bash command line related.
• find - Search a folder hierarchy for filename(s) that meet a desired criteria: Name, Size, File Type.
• grep - Search file(s) for specific text.

Answer 4

I think you want this.

find . -name '*' -type f -exec grep foo /dev/null {} \;

You only want to grep files, not directories or special files. The /dev/null makes grep show the file name. You may want to get rid of '-name '*', but if you do, then dot files will be grepped.

You could also run

grep -r foo .