Use grep to find files and pipe/open to open them

Question

How can I pipe files from grep to open all matching files?

I've tried grep -li "type" * | open, but that does not work.

Answer 1

There is many ways to do this (using find/exec, xargs,...), one could be :

grep -li "type" * | while read file; do echo "processing $file"; done

Answer 2

IFS=$'\n'; for i in $(grep -rli "type" *); do open "$i"; done

The IFS is necessary, so that it won't split filenames containing whitespaces.

Answer 3

Use while read line loop:

| while read line

If

$ grep -l something *.py
file1.py
file2.py

Then

$ grep -l something *.py | while read line ; do open "$line" ; done

Is equivalent to

$ open "file1.py"
$ open "file2.py"

Using quotes like "$line" instead of just $line allows for it to match filenames that contain spaces, otherwise filenames with spaces will cause errors.
Notice that line is just a commonly-used name for a variable in this usage. It could just as easily be

$ grep -l something *.py | while read potato ; do open "$potato" ; done