Maybe OT - Grepping the locate command

[Martin Pitt]

donn [2010-03-03 12:39 +0200]:
> I would like to search through the *contents* of the files returned by 
> locate. So far I have not had much luck.
> 
> locate *.ods | grep blah
> (No good because it greps the filenames, not their contents)
> [...]
> ls | cat
> (I expected a long cat of all the files listed. I got the same as ls on 
> its own. I am sure I am missing something basic here.)

What you are looking for is "xargs". This calls a command on all files
whose paths are provided on stdin.

  locate *.ods | xargs grep blah
  ls | xargs cat

will do what you want.

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)