[clue-tech] Too many words from ``

[Lynn Danielson]

matthew.w.mcillece at lmco.com wrote:
> 
> I occasionally need to search for every occurrence of a string in many (if
> not all) the files in a directory tree.  I can usually just do a
> 
> grep -ns string `find /path/to/tree -name "*" -print` | more
> 
> to get each line that the string occurs on, with the filename and line
> number and no complaints about files that can't be accessed.
> 
> However, sometimes I get the, "Too many words from ``" message and no other
> output.  I assume this message is generated by grep in response to a list of
> files that is bigger than it can handle.  Does anyone have a workaround for
> when this occurs?  Is there a way to make grep work with a bigger list of
> files?

This is what xargs is designed to handle.  Try your command this way:

find /path/to/tree | xargs grep -ns string /dev/null |less

Xargs parses up long argument lists into smaller chunks to avoid that
"too many words" message.  The /dev/null is not usually necessary, but
if you don't include it, it's possible that grep won't print the last
filename in your list even if "string is matched.

Lynn Danielson