Searching XSLT files

I work a lot with XML and XSLT files, and hence I often need to grep files (i.e. search for text strings in files) for certain term. Windows Explorer does a great job for most file types, but unfortunately the Windows Explorer search function does not include any XSLT files when searching. Just try to create a dummy file called a.xslt with a dummy text string FINDME, and try to locate it using Windows Explorer search. You will not find it. Sad, but true. If someone knows of a simple tweak (e.g. registry change) to change this behavior, then please post it in the comment section of this entry. I'm not sure why XSLT files are excluded. Afterall, JavaScript (.js) and C# (.cs) files are included. Maybe XSLT just made the Microsoft black list since it is not a Microsoft standard.

Assuming for now that we cannot change the Windows Explorer search behavior, I wanted to show you how to search all files including XSLT files, using UNIX command tools. If you just need to search the current folder, you can of course you use
grep FINDME *.xslt

And if you have a fixed 3 level folder structure you may do something like this
grep FINDME *\*\*.xslt
but note that this will ONLY look for files that are exactly 3 directories deep (e.g. it will not search the file named a.xslt in the root folder).

So we need a much more flexible solution that can search files located at any directory level. But let me first introduce yet another UNIX command line tool: find. The command find, recursively lists all files and folders matching a given criterion (e.g. name, create date, etc) and may execute a command on each file found. Again, do a "man find" to get an overview of the options.

List all files recursively:
find . -type f

List all files or directories with the string xslt in them:
find . | grep -i xslt

Find any file that contains the text FINDME
find . -type f -exec grep FINDME "{}" ";"

Note that when using -exec you also need to add those special "{}" ";" characters at the end. Don't want to go into great detail here, but you need to always add it. Otherwise you can basically specify any command you want after exec, like we did with grep in the above case.

Nifty.