grep Getting started with grep Find text within a given directory, recursively

Example

Using GNU grep

grep -r 'pattern' <directory path>

To also list line numbers of matches use -n option

grep -rn 'pattern' <directory path>

To search only files with particular glob pattern

grep --include='*.txt' -r 'pattern' <directory path>

Exclude file patterns or directories

grep -R --exclude=*.log 'pattern' <directory path>
grep -R --exclude={*.log,*.class} 'pattern' <directory path>

grep -R --exclude-dir=tmp 'pattern' <directory path>
grep -R --exclude-dir={tmp,lib} 'pattern' <directory path>

Notes and other useful options

• <directory path> can be skipped if searching in current directory
• The -R options follows all symbolic links, unlike -r which follows symbolic links only if they are on the command line
• -l to only list matching files
• -h to suppress filename prefix
• --color=auto to highlight matched patterns
• -m <num> to specify maximum number of matches for each file input

POSIX workaround to search recursively

find <directory path> -type f -exec grep -l 'pattern' {} +

• Options like -n , -l , etc can be used as required
• If {} + is not supported, use {} \; instead
• See find documentation for more help on find command like how to include/exclude file types, directories etc