grep Solaris Recursive Search Not Working – Troubleshooting Guide

greprecursivesolaris

On our Solaris server I'm finding that grep -r doesn't work, which is the usual way that I use grep. It seems that egrep has the same behavior.

Given that I have no control over the machine, is there a way to have grep perform a recursive search? Or do I need to pipe the output of find into grep?

Best Answer

I'm not familiar with Solaris, but if you're switching from GNU/linux to Solaris you'll find most of the commands will behave slightly different. The GNU version of Unix tools have additional features missing in "proprietary" Unixes.

You can download GNU grep(s) here then compile and install.

If you do have root access you might want to run configure --prefix=/usr/local Such that the utilities install into /usr/local

If you do not have root access you might want to run configure --prefix=${HOME} Such that the utilities install into your home directory

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Use auditing.

Solaris Auditing (Overview)

Auditing generates audit records when specified events occur. Most commonly, events that generate audit records include the following:

System startup and system shutdown

Login and logout

Process creation or process destruction, or thread creation or thread destruction

Opening, closing, creating, destroying, or renaming of objects

Use of privilege capabilities or role-based access control (RBAC)

Identification actions and authentication actions

Permission changes by a process or user

Administrative actions, such as installing a package

Site-specific applications

Audit records are generated from three sources:

By an application

As a result of an asynchronous audit event

As a result of a process system call

A good blog article on Solaris auditing can be found here.

POSIX-compliant recursive grep with no errors for inaccessible directories

To make grep print only the file name, pass the -l option. To search for a substring rather than a regular expression, pass the -F option.

To search recursively for files whose name matches a certain pattern, use find with the -type f and -name PATTERN primaries. Use -exec to invoke grep.

find . -name '*.sas' -type f -exec grep -F -l 'Carhart' {} +

If you want to avoid errors from directories that you aren't allowed to traverse, you can either use -perm, -user and -group to analyze permissions (which is difficult to get right, and won't work if you have ACL), or call test (which is slowed because it's an external program, but is more reliable).

find . -type d ! -exec test -r {} -a -x {} \; -prune -o \
       -name '*.sas' -type f -exec test -r {} \; -exec grep -F -l 'Carhart' {} +

Best Answer

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POSIX-compliant recursive grep with no errors for inaccessible directories

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