How to pipe list of files returned by find command to cat to view all the files

Question

I am doing a find and then getting a list of files. How do I pipe it to another utility like cat (so that cat displays the contents of all those fi

Answer 1

To list and see contents of all abc.def files on a server in the directories /ghi and /jkl

find /ghi /jkl -type f -name abc.def 2> /dev/null -exec ls {} \; -exec cat {} \;

To list the abc.def files which have commented entries and display see those entries in the directories /ghi and /jkl

find /ghi /jkl -type f -name abc.def 2> /dev/null -exec grep -H ^# {} \;

Answer 2

Sounds like a job for a shell script to me:

for file in 'find -name *.xml'
do
   grep 'hello' file
done

or something like that

Answer 3

To achieve this (using bash) I would do as follows:

cat $(find . -name '*.foo')

This is known as the "command substitution" and it strips line feed by default which is really convinient !

more infos here

Answer 4

Here is my shot for general use:

grep YOURSTRING `find .`

It will print the file name

Answer 5

In bash, the following would be appropriate:

find /dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0i cat {} | grep whatever

This will find all files in the /dir directory, and safely pipe the filenames into xargs, which will safely drive grep.

Skipping xargs is not a good idea if you have many thousands of files in /dir; cat will break due to excessive argument list length. xargs will sort that all out for you.

The -print0 argument to find meshes with the -0 argument to xargs to handle filenames with spaces properly. The -i argument to xargs allows you to insert the filename where required in the cat command line. The brackets are replaced by the filename piped into the cat command from find.

Answer 6

I use something like this:

find . -name <filename> -print0 | xargs -0 cat | grep <word2search4>

"-print0" argument for "find" and "-0" argument for "xargs" are needed to handle whitespace in file paths/names correctly.