How to use “grep” command to find text including subdirectories Print

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Do the following:

grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/'-e 'pattern'
  • -r or -R is recursive,
  • -n is line number, and
  • -w stands for match the whole word.
  • -l (lower-case L) can be added to just give the file name of matching files.

Along with these, --exclude--include--exclude-dir or --include-dir flags could be used for efficient searching:

  • This will only search through those files which have .c or .h extensions:

    grep --include=\*.{c,h} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
    
  • This will exclude searching all the files ending with .o extension:

grep --exclude=*.o -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/'-e "pattern"
  • Just like exclude files, it's possible to exclude/include directories through --exclude-dir and --include-dir parameter. For example, this will exclude the dirs dir1/, dir2/ and all of them matching *.dst/:
grep --exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,*.dst}-rnw '/path/to/somewhere/'-e "pattern"

This works very well for me, to achieve almost the same purpose like yours.

You can use grep -ilR:

grep -Ril "text-to-find-here" /
  • i stands for ignore case (optional in your case).
  • R stands for recursive.
  • l stands for "show the file name, not the result itself".
  • / stands for starting at the root of your machine.

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