Matthew,

> 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

> However, sometimes I get the, "Too many words from ``" message and no other
> output.

The command between the ` ` marks, as you know, is interpreted by the shell
before the grep command runs.  You may be exceeding the maximum length of a
command line under Linux, which is a really large but not infinite number
of characters (I forget exactly how big).  I don't think your problem is 
with grep itself.

Try using a modified find command instead to do the grep.  This command
should be the exact (but shorter) equivalent of the command above:

find /path/to/tree -name '*' -exec grep -ns string {} \; -print | more

There may be some slight formatting differences between the two commands
that you can solve with awk or perl or some other tool.

--
Jim Ockers (ockers@ockers.net)                     Ask me about Linux!
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