The unix pattern for filtering files with a predicate then searching within them is find | xargs | grep. For example, to search every file whose filename contains notes for a line containing mysql

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$ find . -iname "*notes*" | xargs grep -i mysql

Unfortunately, on OSX this is not robust to spaces or quotes in filenames. Thus if you have a filename like

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./Dropquest 2012/Captain's Logs/Chapter 1.txt

in your search path the typical find | xargs | grep invocation will terminate with the error

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xargs: unterminated quote

The first thing to know is you can use the -t parameter in xargs to at least tell you which filename it’s dying on, but that’s of limited use in making the command work. Even using -I{} with xargs and grep to surround the filename with quotes doesn’t fix this.

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$ find . -iname "*notes*" | xargs -I{} grep -i mysql "{}"

Many people must have run into this problem because there is a simple solution that all the tools understand: use nulls instead of newlines to delimit files.

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$ find . -iname "*notes*" -print0 | xargs -I{} -0 grep -i mysql "{}"

and it works!