Question

On my debian machine, I’m playing around with some code and regex. So anyway, I’m looking to find the following pattern in some code files:

function(some text $tring||$_string)

Currently I’m using the following command

find . -type f | xargs grep "function"

I tried using

find . -type f | xargs grep "function(*$string||$_tring*)"

but it did not work.

Essentially it needs to search all patterns that match the following rules

• includes function()
• inside function, match the either of the following strings
  • $string or
  • $_tring

How do I do this?

Answer 1

find . -type f -exec egrep -Hn 'function\(.*(\$string|\$_string).*\)' '{}' ';'

To be able to handle filenames containing spaces, and also if there are a lot of files.

man 3 regex if you want to read more about the regex syntax:

.            any character, in shell (sh/csh) this is '?'
.*           zero or more any characters
a*           zero or more a's
(alpha|beta) groups, either alpha or beta
^            beginning of string
$            end of string, that's why it needs to be escaped