Question

There must be a better / shorter way to do this:

# Find files that contain <string-to-find> in current directory
#   (including sub directories) 
$ find . | xargs grep <string-to-find>

Also, to search only e.g. HTML files:

 # find . | grep html$ | xargs grep <string-to-find>

Thanks beforehand!

Answer 1

find . -name \*.html

or, if you want to find files with names matching a regular expression:

find . -regex filename-regex.\*\.html 

or, if you want to search for a regular expression in files with names matching a regular expression

find . -regex filename-regex.\*\.html -exec grep -H string-to-find {} \;

The grep argument -H outputs the name of the file, if that’s of interest. If not, you can safely remove it and simply use grep. This will instruct find to execute grep string-to-find filename for each file name it finds, thus avoiding the possibility of the list of arguments being too long, and the need for find to finish executing before it can pass its results to xargs.

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To address your examples:

find . | xargs grep <string-to-find>

could be replaced with

find . -exec grep -H string-to-find {} \;

and

find . | grep html$ | xargs grep <string-to-find>

could be replaced with

find . -name \*.html -exec grep -H string-to-find {} \;