I don't really understand this. Why use grep? You can just use `find ~/Documents -name somefileiwant -ls`. You can use -regex or -path if you need to use regular expressions to describe a filename or path, respectively.

Alternatively, if you really wanted to use find and grep together, there is no need for any file I/O. You can just use `find ~/Documents -exec ls -l {} + | grep somefileiwant`.

That's OK, this tool isn't for everyone :)

Lightning was built because I was tired of both the "cd x; ls; cd x; ls; cd x" and "cd x<tab>x<tab>/xx<tab>x<tab>" patterns and wanted something faster where all I had to do was hit the right keys and I would automagically get to my destination. It's less about finding files than it is about getting to them; in fact, I can imagine myself opening files found with the above method much faster with Lightning than I would using standard shell tools. But that might just be me.

   ls -lh $(find ~/Documents | grep "somefileiwant")

It's all you should ever need.

You might like mlocate.