Question

I am writing a PHP command line script, and I’m wondering if any grep experts can help me to come up with a command to do the following:

For all files ending in .java in the current directory ($curDir), search within the file for any instance of $str, and return an indicator whether any instance has been found or not.

I’ve tried piecing together a grep command from various bits found on the internet but, having not really used grep before, its a bit difficult to piece together. I would appreciate any help.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This should do the trick:

exec("grep '$str' *.java", $output_array);

Use -l if you want it to just output the file names. Other grep options can be found here:
http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?grep

Depending on what $str is you may need to pass it through: escapeshellarg():
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.escapeshellarg.php