I recently had to grep through a few hundred thousand log files in a single directory. The logs dated back several years and had never been organized into directories. In fact, there were so many log files that grep’ing the directory resulted in an “argument list too long” error. This error is described clearly here, and the quickest solution is to use find to pipe the filenames into grep using xargs:

find . -name "*.log" -print0 | xargs -0 grep "xyz"

» Read more: Organizing log files into date based directories