To grep on the results of a find command, you can use something like find . -iname '*.py' -exec grep something -inH --color {} + Another solution is to use xargs find . -iname '*.py' -print0 | xargs -0 grep something -inH --color The output can be redirected to a file find . -iname '*.py' -exec grep something -inH --color {} + > output.txt Notes: Here is an excerpt from the man page of find (https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/find.1.html -> search for "-exec command {} +") -exec command {} + This variant of the -exec action runs the specified command on the selected files, but the command line is built by appending each selected file name at the end; the total number of invocations of the command will be much less than the number of matched files. The command line is built in much the same way that xargs builds its command lines. Only one instance of `{}' is allowed within the command, and it must appear at the end, immediately before the `+'; it needs to be escaped (with a `\') or quoted to protect it from interpretation by the shell. The command is executed in the starting directory. If any invocation with the `+' form returns a non-zero value as exit status, then find returns a non-zero exit status. If find encounters an error, this can sometimes cause an immediate exit, so some pending commands may not be run at all. For this reason -exec my- command ... {} + -quit may not result in my-command actually being run. This variant of -exec always returns true.