How to search files on a Time Machine backup disk only once perfile

Greetings,
Goal: I want to find all user files in a set of Time Machine backups residing on a single disk that contain the string "escalator". Now, there are multiple hard links to each file, so a simple search would search each file multiple times. That would take a very long time. Is there a way that I can search (grep) all text files and mail files only once and list those that contain the string? Note that I only want to search user directories; that is,
/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/username’s iMac/Latest/Macintosh HD/Users
where "Latest" can also be any of the dates of all the backups.
Thanks!

Well, to clarify:
I want to find all user text files and mail messages on a Time Machine backup disk that contain the word "escalator".
By user files I mean those in
/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/<username>iMac/*/Macintosh HD/Users
and subdirectories thereof.
I was trying to use the find command, but it was taking a very long time, so I aborted it. I then realized that most of the files have many hard links, and therefore will be searched many times. That, of course, is a great waste.
Is there some way to search each file only once?
Thanks.

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