find . -exec grep -l ‘a bit of text’ {} \;

This post has allowed me to recreate this about 20 times now, when I used to always ask you the syntax…

Amazon have this book for better price.
http://www.amazon.com/Easy-Linux-Commands-Examples-Command/dp/0975913506/sr=8-1/qid=1161269074/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-2287464-9167267?ie=UTF8

Usually when I’m doing stuff like this I’m not too worried about performance (kick it off and walk away), but your right. xargs could save big on a large find.

Thanks for sharing.

Simple exmaple, lets say you have a tree of files with emacs backup files scattered thought out, lets say there are 100 of them in total.

find . -name \*~ -exec rm {} \;

The above will remove them, but 100 rm processes will be created in addition to the single find process. Process creation is a _relatively_ slow operation, process to create, new command to load, dymanic libraries to load and initialise, etc…

find . -name \*~ -print | xargs rm

This will do the same job but only create one (or maybe a few more) rm processes.
xargs(1) as describe in the manual page contructs cmd lines and execute them, it knows the max cmd line length and will only create additional cmdlines to execute if the cmd line its creating gets too long. So the process count here is find + xargs + rm * N where N will be most likely be