Help with UNIX scripting (mailx and for loops)

[Saint Nick]

I'm very new to UNIX scripts. I'm trying to write a script that looks for a string in a certain type of files, then copy those files to my home directory on the UNIX box.

Here is what I have so far, and it works as it should...

find *.sas -exec grep -l "garmstrong" {} \;

But how do I take the list of files it outputs, and copy them to my home directory? Would I need to do something like this?

cp fileorig filedest

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Markbnj
Programming moderator

 

[Nothinman]

You could pipe that to xargs and I would suggest using -print0 and I think it's -0 on the xargs side, that causes the arguments to be null terminated instead of space terminated.

 

[dinkumthinkum]

Two ways, not using xargs:

Using "logical AND" operator to find (-a):

find *.sas -exec grep -l "garmstrong" \{\} \; -a -exec cp \{\} ~ \;

Using a sh-style for loop:

for f in `grep -l "garmstring" *.sas`; do cp "$f" ~; done

 

[Saint Nick]

Thanks to everyone who helped me with my previous issue.

Now, I am simply trying to send a list of files via e-mail to a user. List of files is stored within the $files variable. So far, I only have the following

mailx -s "Asset Suite Data Load Errors" "The following files contain errors:\n"

and

for f in $files
do
    echo $f
done

So, when the user views it, it is in a list format rather than inline.

UNIX scripting is so fun and I'm learning so much. I'm having a hard time understanding how data "works" in single commands with the pipe.