[FIXED] Which is best way to grep on exec from find command?

Issue

I'm just curious which of these statements would be most resource intensive.

I expect the criteria at times to be 1000s of files, and want to make sure I implement the "safest" execution. Files themselves will be relatively small, but the amount of files might be substantially large.

The two alternatives:

sudo find /home/users -name '*.sh' -type f -exec grep -n 'rm.*tmp.*7z$' {} \+
sudo find /home/users -name '*.sh' -type f -exec grep -Hn 'rm.*tmp.*7z$' {} \;

As you can see the only difference is whether I should use the + or the ;

Solution

The first one is going to run grep fewer times than the second, which will launch one instance per file. grep's startup time is pretty fast, so it might not be much of a visible improvement, but the first one will be more efficient, the second one more resource intensive.

(You'll want to add -H to the first grep's options too, just in case it gets run with a single filename argument at some point.)

Answered By - Shawn

Answer Checked By - Marilyn (PHPFixing Volunteer)