On a Linux or UNIX server this is one of my most frequently used commands.

It is an easy way to find a string you know is in a group of files, but don't know or can't remember which file it is in.

For the example above, I knew that WebCenter Content sends a bunch of alter session commands to the database when it opens a new database connection. I wanted to find where these were defined and what all the alter session commands were.

So, I ran these commands:

cd /opt/oracle/middleware/Oracle_ECM1/ucm/idc/resources/core
find . -name "*.htm" -exec grep -iH "alter session" {} \;


And the results were:

./tables/query.htm: ALTER SESSION SET optimizer_mode = ?
./tables/query.htm: ALTER SESSION SET NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS = ?
./tables/query.htm: ALTER SESSION SET NLS_SORT = ?
./tables/query.htm: ALTER SESSION SET NLS_COMP = ?
./tables/query.htm: ALTER SESSION SET CURSOR_SHARING = ?
./tables/query.htm: ALTER SESSION SET EVENTS '30579 trace name context forever, level 2'
./tables/query.htm: ALTER SESSION SET NLS_DATE_FORMAT = ?
./tables/query.htm: alter session set events '30579 trace name context forever, level 2'

I could then go edit the query.htm file and find the include that contained all the ALTER SESSION commands.