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

Question

In Windows, I would have done a search for finding a word inside a folder. Similarly, I want to know if a specific word occurs inside a directory containing many sub-directo

Answer 1

Run(terminal) the following command inside the directory. It will recursively check inside subdirectories too.

grep -r 'your string goes here' * 

Answer 2

grep -nr string my_directory

Additional notes: this satisfies the syntax grep [options] string filename because in Unix-like systems, a directory is a kind of file (there is a term "regular file" to specifically refer to entities that are called just "files" in Windows).

grep -nr string reads the content to search from the standard input, that is why it just waits there for input from you, and stops doing so when you press ^C (it would stop on ^D as well, which is the key combination for end-of-file).

Answer 3

grep -nr search_string search_dir

will do a RECURSIVE (meaning the directory and all it's sub-directories) search for the search_string. (as correctly answered by usta).

The reason you were not getting any anwers with your friend's suggestion of:

grep -nr string

is because no directory was specified. If you are in the directory that you want to do the search in, you have to do the following:

grep -nr string .

It is important to include the '.' character, as this tells grep to search THIS directory.

Answer 4

GREP: Global Regular Expression Print/Parser/Processor/Program.
You can use this to search the current directory.
You can specify -R for "recursive", which means the program searches in all subfolders, and their subfolders, and their subfolder's subfolders, etc.

grep -R "your word" .

-n will print the line number, where it matched in the file.
-i will search case-insensitive (capital/non-capital letters).

grep -inR "your regex pattern" .

Answer 5

Another option that I like to use:

find folder_name -type f -exec grep your_text  {} \;

-type f returns you only files and not folders

-exec and {} runs the grep on the files that were found in the search (the exact syntax is "-exec command {}").

Answer 6

The answer you selected is fine, and it works, but it isn't the correct way to do it, because:

grep -nr yourString* .

This actually searches the string "yourStrin" and "g" 0 or many times.

So the proper way to do it is:

grep -nr \w*yourString\w* .

This command searches the string with any character before and after on the current folder.