The following alias, which i call 'cGrep' searches recursively in all the C files: find . -type f \( -name "*.[cCh]" -o -name \*.cpp \) -print |xargs fgrep !* In tcsh you can set it up as:

alias cGrep 'find . -type f \( -name "*.[cCh]" -o -name \*.cpp \) -pri
+nt |xargs fgrep !*'
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and use it as:

 > cGrep '\"[^;]*'
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It is not doing exactly the same as your script but i find it useful.