Error: “grep: Argument list too long” [duplicate]

Answer 1

Use find

find /home/*/public_html -type f -exec grep -l 'pattern' {} +

The + modifier makes it group the filenames in manageable chunks.

However, you can do it with grep -r. The arguments to this should be the directory names, not filenames.

grep -rl 'pattern' /home/*/public_html

This will just have 500+ arguments, not thousands of filenames.