find expressions with exec

Question

I had a bit of trouble with find. This didn't do what I expected:

find . -iname "*.hh" -or -iname "*.h" -exec grep -inH "IDENTIFIER" {} \;

I expected it to grep in both *.hh and *.h files but it only greps the result of -iname "*.h". I resorted to using xargs to solve it.

find . -iname "*.hh" -or -iname "*.h" | xargs grep -inH "IDENTIFIER"

But is there a way to use -exec without writing it twice like this:

find . -iname "*.hh" -exec grep -inH "IDENTIFIER" {} \; -or -iname "*.h" -exec grep -inH "IDENTIFIER" {} \;

devnull · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-28 12:36:21Z

3

You can say:

find . \( -iname "*.hh" -o -iname "*.h" \) -exec ...

to find both *.hh and *.h files.

answered Nov 28, 2013 at 12:36

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Comments

drmrgd · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-28 12:50:54Z

You could also do it with the regex option to grep:

find . -regex '.*\.hh?' -exec grep -inH "IDENTIFIER" {} \;