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Searching for string in files

Suppose I have a directory called Home and it is my current directory.

And in this home directory I have many other directories

directory1, directory2, etc.

How do I do a grep to find the occurrence of a word (say "AXN") in any of the files in all of these subdirectories (and their subdirectories?)

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marked as duplicate by Gilles, manatwork, Michael Mrozek♦ Mar 29 '12 at 15:41

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2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

You can use something like:

grep -r "AXN" .

Use -ir if you want it to be case-insensitive.

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Ok. Thank you very much for the help. – CodeBlue Mar 28 '12 at 13:52
I remember I had achieved this before using a "." or "./", but I forgot the syntax. Do you know how it could be done that way? – CodeBlue Mar 28 '12 at 13:54
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add a dot at the very end instead of the asterisk. using the dot is better, so it does not search binary files. – Uku Loskit Mar 28 '12 at 13:56
Ok Thanks @Uku Loskit. – CodeBlue Mar 28 '12 at 14:15
Dot will search binary files. Use the -I flag to skip them. – JodieC Mar 28 '12 at 23:56
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Try 

find / -type f -exec grep -il AXN {} +
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To avoid issues with whitespace, you should use find ... -print0 | xargs -0 ... or find ... -exec ... {} + (or {} \; if you want only one at a time). – Kevin Mar 28 '12 at 17:19
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This may be functional but it involves launching a grep process for every file in the subdirectory. So, this may turn out be slower than grep -r – Gowtham Mar 28 '12 at 17:27
Thanks guys, I did't think of performance. my fault :) – mibzer Mar 28 '12 at 21:23
@Gowtham: like you, I prefer the xargs form, but the + on the end of that find command makes it construct a long command line like xargs does. i.e. {} + is different to plain {}. xargs has other advantages, including -P or --max-procs to run multiple commands in parallel (very nice on a multi-core system when combined with -n) – Craig Sanders Jul 29 '12 at 11:07

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