How can I grep while avoiding 'Too many arguments' [duplicate]

Answer 1

you can use find to find all files which name's starting with the pattern '1US'. Then you can pipe the output to xargs which will take care, that the argument list will not growing to much and handle the grep call. Note that I've used a nullbyte to separate filenames for xargs. This avoids problems with problematic file names. ;)

find -maxdepth 1 -name '1US*' -printf '%f\0' | xargs -0 grep -u user@domain | awk ...

Answer 2

Run several instances of grep. Instead of

grep -i user@domain.com 1US* | awk '{...}' | xargs rm

do

(for i in 1US*; do grep -li user@domain "$i"; done) | xargs rm

Note the -l flag, since we only want the file name of the match. This will both speed up grep (terminate on first match) and makes your awk script unrequired. This could be improved by checking the return status of grep and calling rm, not using xargs (xargs is very fragile, IMO). I'll give you the better version if you ask.

Hope it helps.

Answer 3

Using xargs is more efficient than using "find ... -exec grep" because you have less process creations etc.

One way to go about this would be:

ls 1US* | xargs grep -i user@domain.com | awk -F: '{print $1}' | xargs rm

But easier would be:

find . -iname "1US*" -exec rm {} \;

Answer 4

Use find and a loop instead of xargs.

find . -name '1US*' | \
while read x; do grep -iq user@domain "$x" && rm "$x"; done

This uses pipes and loops instead of arguments (both for grep and rm) and prevents issues related with limits on arguments.

Answer 5

The -exec argument to find is useful here, I've used this myself in similar situations.

E.g.

# List the files that match
find /path/to/input/ -type f -exec grep -qiF spammer@spammy.com \{\} \; -print
# Once you're sure you've got it right
find /path/to/input/ -type f -exec grep -qiF spammer@spammy.com \{\} \; -delete