Location of files on Unix whose file names and contents each match a regular expression

Question

I want to search for file names with a regular expression, and grep it using regex. I tried this:

find .  -name co_on*eruo* | xargs grep '0LF2C Comdty(.*)20111022(.*)'

But it doesn't work. What am I doing incorrectly?

Answer 1

find .  -regex co_on*eruo* | xargs grep '0LF2C Comdty(.*)20111022(.*)'

Answer 2

First of all, exactly how doesn't it work?

You need to quote the pattern (note: it's not a regex) to keep the shell from expanding it:

find .  -name 'co_on*eruo*' | xargs grep '0LF2C Comdty(.*)20111022(.*)'

EDIT

But if that's really supposed to be a regex (i.e., you want to match "co_o", then zero or more "n"s, then "eru", then zero or more "o"s), then as Tim says you need to use -regex rather than -name. (That's probably a GNU-specific feature; if find --version doesn't say something like find (GNU findutils) 4.4.2, then your find might not support -regex.)

Answer 3

Did you wan't the parantheses in the grep expression, or where they only there since you thought you needed them for the regexp functionality?

As it looks, you could probably do what you want with grep directly:

grep -R --include='co_on*eruo*' '0LF2C Comdty.*20111022.*'

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Perhaps you want -name to span directory names as well - it doesn't. Give more info on the exact paths if you want a solution for that.