Linux search for text in files of same name in multiple folders (maxdepth 2) and generate a report file

Question

Situation: In Linux, I have a parent folder with 22 folders of various names, each with a file of a particular name asset.xml. Also in these folders are hundreds of other folders with asset.xmlin them, but these are previous versions and I'm not interested in them. I need to search inside each file for 3 tags "legend|assetID|name" and return the information inside these tags. They're usually on the same line so i think Grep is ok.

What i've tried:

grep -nr -E "legend|assetID|name" . > /dir/to/the/ReportFile.txt

This takes way too long and return way too much duplicated data, so this isn't practical.

find . -maxdepth 2 -exec grep -E "legend|assetID|name" . > /dir/to/the/ReportFile.txt

This returned an error with -exec missing an argument, so the output file was empty.

find . -maxdepth 2 -| grep -E "legend|assetID|name" . > /dir/to/the/ReportFile.txt

This returned an empty output file.

Question: How do I go through each like-named file each inside various-named folders (which also have other subfolders with files of the same name) and extract information inside the 3 tags and write this data into an output file?

Answer 1

I just found the solution.

grep -nr -E "legend|assetID|name" /dir/to/the/*/asset.xml > /dir/to/the/ReportFile.txt

The * in the path is the "wildcard" I needed to go through each directory. I think it only goes to that directory and not into any deeper folder...?

Answer 2

Your command line with find was almost correct :-)

The file(s) found by find is represented by {}. The -exec part of the find command line must be finished somehow, with \; or often better with + which invokes grep only once, and I suggest that you run grep only on normal files -type f, try

find . -maxdepth 2 -type f -exec grep -E "legend|assetID|name" {} + > ../output

You may want to specify the file name asset.xml

find . -maxdepth 2 -type f -name asset.xml -exec grep -E "legend|assetID|name" {} + > ../output

Check the result with

cat ../output

You may want to modify the maxdepth to 3 or whatever is suitable.