Shell – Using find with -exec gzip and grep

Try

find /srv/www/*/htdocs/system/application/ -name "*.php" -exec grep "debug (" {} \; -print

This should recursively search the folders under application for files with .php extension and pass them to grep.

An optimization on this would be to execute:

find /srv/www/*/htdocs/system/application/ -name "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -H "debug ("

This uses xargs to pass all the .php files output by find as arguments to a single grep command; e.g., grep "debug (" file1 file2 file3. The -print0 option of find and -0 option of xargs ensure the spaces in file and directory names are correctly handled. The -H option passed to grep ensures that the filename is printed in all situations. (By default, grep prints the filename only when multiple arguments are passed in.)

From man xargs:

-0

Input items are terminated by a null character instead of by whitespace, and the quotes and backslash are not special (every character is taken literally).  Disables the end of file string, which is treated like any other argument.  Useful when input items might contain white space, quote marks, or backslashes.  The GNU find -print0 option produces input suitable for this mode.

; is the shell's command separator. Everything after it will be a separate command and won't be passed to find, since command parsing is done before execution. Likewise, &>/dev/null applies to the entire find command, not just to php, regardless of where it is located (before, in the middle, or after).

To use such operators in your -exec or -ok, you will have to explicitly call a shell:

find ... -exec bash -c 'php -l "{}" >&/dev/null; echo $?' \;

Note that the special characters are inside quotes, which means they will be passed literally to find and then to bash.

This is less simple but might be more reliable with "weird" filenames:

find ... -exec bash -c 'php -l "$1" >&/dev/null; echo $?' -- {} \;

This will display the results in a more readable form: (this is entirely about bash scripting now, not about find anymore)

find ... -exec bash -c '
    if php -l "$1" >&/dev/null; then
        echo "$1: pass"
    else
        echo "$1: fail"
    fi' -- {} \;