How to Grep a String in a Directory and All Its Subdirectories

How to grep a string in a directory and all its subdirectories?

If your grep supports -R, do:

grep -R 'string' dir/

If not, then use find:

find dir/ -type f -exec grep -H 'string' {} +

How can I use grep to find a word inside a folder?

grep -nr 'yourString*' .

The dot at the end searches the current directory. Meaning for each parameter:

-n            Show relative line number in the file
'yourString*' String for search, followed by a wildcard character
-r            Recursively search subdirectories listed
.             Directory for search (current directory)

grep -nr 'MobileAppSer*' . (Would find MobileAppServlet.java or MobileAppServlet.class or MobileAppServlet.txt; 'MobileAppASer*.*' is another way to do the same thing.)

To check more parameters use man grep command.

How do I recursively grep all directories and subdirectories?

grep -r "texthere" .

The first parameter represents the regular expression to search for, while the second one represents the directory that should be searched. In this case, . means the current directory.

Note: This works for GNU grep, and on some platforms like Solaris you must specifically use GNU grep as opposed to legacy implementation. For Solaris this is the ggrep command.

How to find all files containing specific text (string) on Linux

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.
• -e is the pattern used during the search

Along with these, --exclude, --include, --exclude-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"

• For directories it's possible to exclude one or more directories using the --exclude-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.

For more options, see man grep.

Using grep to search for specific type of files in all subdirectories

You can use the following option of grep:

 --include=GLOB
 Search only files whose base name matches GLOB (using wildcard matching as described under --exclude).

And for the line number you should use the -n option.
From within the root of the folders you want to look into, you can use this final command:

grep -nr "Mutual_Values_23.0" --include="gnuout_mutual_*txt"

How do I use grep to search the current directory for all files having the a string hello yet display only .h and .cc files?

grep -r --include=*.{cc,h} "hello" .

This reads: search recursively (in all sub directories also) for all .cc OR .h files that contain "hello" at this . (current) directory

From another stackoverflow question

grep in all directories

grep -R --include="*.c" --exclude-dir={DEF} writeFile /path/to/XYZ

• -R means recursive, so it will go into subdirectories of the directory you're grepping through
• --include="*.c" means "look for files ending in .c"
• --exclude-dir={DEF} means "exclude directories named DEF. If you want to exclude multiple directories, do this: --exclude-dir={DEF,GBA,XYZ}
• writeFile is the pattern you're grepping for
• /path/to/XYZ is the path to the directory you want to grep through.

Note that these flags apply to GNU grep, might be different if you're using BSD/SysV/AIX grep. If you're using Linux/GNU grep utils you should be fine.

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