Finding files containing 'string'

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2006-02-01 at 14:26, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Wednesday 01 Feb 2006 16:58, Paul Howarth wrote:
> > My personal favourite solution for this problem:
> >
> > $ grep -i -r -l 'string' /place/to.start/searching
> >
> That worked well when I searched /etc, but when I tried the same search 
> on /usr or /var it got many 'no such file or directory' returns, and 
> eventually reported a loop in the search.  I wanted to save the results 
> to a text file.  The /etc one worked.  The other two resulted in a text 
> file being created, but at soon as it hit a non-existant file it jumped 
> back to screen, and nothing at all is written in the text file.

It's probably not a good idea to let things wander through /proc
or /dev reading everything in sight.  You might also have trouble
with symlinks pointing to files that don't exist but I
don't think that should make the program stop.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com