The find command is really useful to identify files with a given name that also contain a string somewhere inside of them.
For instance lets say I’m looking for the string "pacf(" in an R markdown file somewhere in my current directory.
find . -name "*.Rmd" -exec grep -ls "pacf(" {} ;
I get useful results.
However, sometimes, I’m not sure if the file I am looking for is an .R file or a .Rmd file so I might also run.
find . -name "*.R" -exec grep -ls "pacf(" {} ;
And lets say there are no R files containing this string so that returns nothing.
One think I’d like to do is look in both .R and .Rmd files for this string. I would think that I could run
find . -name "*.Rmd" -o -name "*.R" -exec grep -ls "pacf(" {}
But that returns no results.
However if I run
find . -name "*.R" -o -name "*.Rmd" -exec grep -ls "pacf(" {}
I get the same results as just searching the .Rmd files. So it seems like it is only running the stuff in exec for the second set of files.
Is there a way I could change these commands to look through both the .R and .Rmd files at once?
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Answer
Add parentheses ‘()’
find . ( -name '*.R' -o -name '*.Rmd' ) -exec grep -ls "pacf(" {} ;