Question

Anyone know how I could go about writing a unix shell script (ksh) that would print the first line of any files that match the name “README” in the current and sub directories?

Answer 1

Using find with head

find . -name 'README' -exec head -1 {} \;

Why \;?

From find manual

-exec command ;
Execute command; true if 0 status is returned. All following arguments to find are taken to be arguments to the command until an argument
consisting of ;' is encountered. The string{}’ is replaced by the current file name being processed everywhere it occurs in the argu‐
ments to the command, not just in arguments where it is alone, as in some versions of find. Both of these constructions might need to be
escaped (with a `\’) or quoted to protect them from expansion by the shell. See the EXAMPLES section for examples of the use of the -exec
option. The specified command is run once for each matched file. The command is executed in the starting directory. There are unavoid‐
able security problems surrounding use of the -exec action; you should use the -execdir option instead.