Grepping Multiple Files Recursively

Recently I was faced with the task of looking for the occurences of a variable name in all files in a directory recursively. Here is a quick bash incantation that accomplishes that:

$ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -l variable-name

The above can be understood better if we break it down at the pipe character. To the left of the pipe we use the find command to generate a list of file names recursively starting at the current directory. We use find with the -print0 action because we are passing the output to another program via a pipe and this way the list of file names come out delimited by a null character. Next, we feed the output of find to the input of xargs which will split the long list of file names into sublists and calls grep once for every sublist. The grep command then filters the list of file names and returns only the ones that contain the variable-name string in them.

Pretty cool, eh?