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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-29T15:34:45+00:00

I’m looking for help with a one-liner that I can run from the Mac

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I’m looking for help with a one-liner that I can run from the Mac OS X terminal. I use MAMP for web development on my Mac. I have a lot of CakePHP projects in my “/Applications/MAMP/htdocs” directory. For the sake of simplicity, let’s just say that I had two CakePHP projects and that this was the output of the find /Applications/MAMP/htdocs -type d -iname Controller* command:

/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake1.3_project/app/controllers
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake1.3_project/app/tests/cases/controllers
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake1.3_project/cake/console/templates/skel/controllers
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake1.3_project/cake/console/templates/skel/tests/cases/controllers
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake1.3_project/cake/libs/controller
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake1.3_project/cake/tests/cases/libs/controller
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake1.3_project/cake/tests/test_app/controllers
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake1.3_project/cake/tests/test_app/plugins/test_plugin/controllers
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake2_project/app/Controller
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake2_project/app/Test/Case/Controller
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake2_project/lib/Cake/Console/Templates/skel/Controller
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake2_project/lib/Cake/Console/Templates/skel/Test/Case/Controller
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake2_project/lib/Cake/Controller
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake2_project/lib/Cake/Test/Case/Controller
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake2_project/lib/Cake/Test/test_app/Controller
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake2_project/lib/Cake/Test/test_app/Plugin/TestPlugin/Controller

Now, sometimes I want to find a piece of code that I know I used in one of my CakePHP projects’ controllers, but I can’t remember which project it was, so I want to search all of them. I don’t want to waste time searching in the “app/tests/cases/controllers” folder or any of the ones within “cake/”, though. The find /Applications/MAMP/htdocs -type d -iname Controller* | grep -i /app/Controller command gives me the list of folders I want to search in:

/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake1.3_project/app/controllers
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/my_cake2_project/app/Controller

I just need to find a way to take that output, add a slash and asterisk (/*) to the end of each line, and pipe each line to the grep -il "string to search for" command. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    solution 1

    maybe you want to check two options of find command: (i)path and regex
    with them you could narrow your find result and pass found files to your grep -il "searchString" for example by |xargs . it looks like:

        find /Applications/MAMP/htdocs -type f -ipath "*/app/Controller/*.php" 
| xargs grep -il 'foo'

    with -regex would be more flexiable.

    solution 2

    however if you really really want to :

    find a way to take that output, add a slash and asterisk (/*) to the
    end of each line, and pipe each line to the grep -il “string to search
    for” command.

    (btw, here “pipe” won’t work.)

    you could do this:

    find .(your original find).. |grep -i "/app/Controller" 
 |sed -r 's#^(.*)$#grep -il "foo" \1/*#g'|sh

    the trick was done by the sed....|sh. the sed line will pick the result of your previous grep, add grep command and options 🙁grep -il "foo") and append “/*” in order to construct a complete grep command. finally pipe to sh, to execute it.

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