Question

I have a machine with grep installed but option -R is not compiled-in and there is also no replacement switch.

How can I replace it in bash?

I tried:

for i in `find *`; do
    grep 'pattern' $i;
done

but that is not right re-interpretation, isn’t it?

Answer 1

Try piping the output of find to xargs so that grep only gets invoked a few times (xargs keeps reading input until it gets so much that more would not fit in an argument list):

find -type f | xargs grep foo