I am learning to use grep, sort with pipe

What I want to do is use grep to find all files in Linux containing the the string "etc". And pipe the result into sort.

Grep –r etc * | sort > etc-grep.txt

Running it from the / directory. This command hangs - what am I doing wrong ?

Thanks

Brendon

the / directory is the root of your file system, so before it will return it'll have to recursively open and grep every single file on your hard drive for the string 'etc'. Then it will have to sort all the lines which it finds. This will unfortunately take a while!

Try the same command in your home directory:

HTH

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