Unix – How to pipe list of files returned by find command to cat to view all the files

findpipeunix

I am doing a find and then getting a list of files. How do I pipe it to another utility like cat (so that cat displays the contents of all those files) and basically need to grep something from these files.

Best Answer

  1. Piping to another process (Although this WON'T accomplish what you said you are trying to do):

    command1 | command2
    

    This will send the output of command1 as the input of command2

  2. -exec on a find (this will do what you are wanting to do -- but is specific to find)

    find . -name '*.foo' -exec cat {} \;
    

    (Everything between find and -exec are the find predicates you were already using. {} will substitute the particular file you found into the command (cat {} in this case); the \; is to end the -exec command.)

  3. send output of one process as command line arguments to another process

    command2 `command1`
    

    for example:

    cat `find . -name '*.foo' -print`
    

    (Note these are BACK-QUOTES not regular quotes (under the tilde ~ on my keyboard).) This will send the output of command1 into command2 as command line arguments. Note that file names containing spaces (newlines, etc) will be broken into separate arguments, though.