What text do I have to put in mc's File Find text field “Content:”?

Question

Midnight Commander 3.4.8.1 > File Find. What text do I have to put in the »Content:« text field and in the other fields? I tried several settings in the other fields but mc always returned no result. (This is not explained in 'man mc'.) My hope is to perform some grep-like action using mc. http://svn.dd-wrt.com:8000/browser//src/router/mc2/src/filemanager/find.c did not enlighten me.

Answer 1

I managed now to obtain meaningful results. I probably always had set the mask in the »File Name:« text field too narrow. I set it now to '*', and now it works. I asserted also »Use Shell Pattern«, »Search for Contents« and »Case«.

Answer 2

You must compelte all the fields that are required for a complete search. You must tell mc everything, like:

• where to search (start at)
• file name (what file you are looking for; here you can use wildcards like *)
• what is inside that file you are intersted in (content)

The output of the search will be like: no:filename where:

• no is the number of the line in the file where your content was found.
• filename is the name of the file find by search according to your parameters from "Start at" and "File name."