Question

I’m trying to return a particular line from files found from this search:

find . -name "database.php"

Each of these files contains a database name, next to a php variable like $dname=

I’ve been trying to use -exec to execute a grep search on this file with no success

 -exec "grep {\}\ dbname"

Can anyone provide me with some understanding of how to accomplish this task?

I’m running CentOS 5, and there are about 100 database.php files stored in subdirectories on my server.

Thanks

Jason

Answer 1

You have the arguments to grep inverted, and you need them as separate arguments:

find . -name "database.php" -exec grep '$dbname' /dev/null {} +

The presence of /dev/null ensures that the file name(s) that match are listed as well as the lines that match.