what is wrong with find . | xargs grep '…'?

'.' matches any character, so you'll be finding all lines that contain 3 or more characters.

You can either escape the dots, like this:

find . | xargs grep '...'

Or you can use fgrep, which does a literal match instead of a regex match:

find . | xargs fgrep '...'

(Some versions of grep also accept a -F flag which makes them behave like fgrep.)

If you are literally typing grep '...' you'll match just about any string. I doubt you're actually typing '...' for your grep command, but if you are, the ... will match any three characters.

Please post more info on what you're searching for, and maybe someone can help you out more.

If you're looking for a filename that matches, try:

find . -name "filename pattern"

or

find . | grep "filename pattern"

If your looking for looking for files that match (ie it contains the grep string)

find . | xargs grep "string pattern"

works fine. or simply:

grep "string pattern" -R *

@OP, if you are looking for files that contain ...,

grep -R "..." *

To complete Jeremy's answer, you may also want to try

find . -type f | xargs grep 'your_pattern'

or

find . -type f -exec grep 'your_pattern' {} +

Which is similar to a xargs

I might add : RTFM ! Or in a more polite way : use & abuse of

man command

!