Using grep to search files provided by find: what is wrong with find . | xargs grep '...'?

Question

When I use the command:

find . | xargs grep '...' 

I get the wrong matches. I'm trying to search for the string ... in all files in the current folder.

Answer 1

As Andy White said, you have to use fgrep in order to match for plain ., or escape the dots.

So you have to write (-type f is to only have the files : you obviously don't want the directories.) :

find . -type f | xargs fgrep '...' 

or if you still want to use grep :

find . -type f | xargs grep '\.\.\.' 

And if you only want the current directory and not its subdirs :

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs fgrep '...'