Using grep to search files provided by find: what is wrong with find . | xargs grep '...'?
As Andy White said, you have to use fgrep in order to match for plain ., or escape the dots.
So you have to write (-type f is to only have the files : you obviously don't want the directories.) :
find . -type f | xargs fgrep '...'or if you still want to use grep :
find . -type f | xargs grep '\.\.\.'And if you only want the current directory and not its subdirs :
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs fgrep '...'
'.' matches any character, so you'll be finding all lines that contain 3 or more characters.
You can either escape the dots, like this:
find . | xargs grep '\.\.\.'Or you can use fgrep, which does a literal match instead of a regex match:
find . | xargs fgrep '...'(Some versions of grep also accept a -F flag which makes them behave like fgrep.)