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Is there an easy way to search inside 1000s of files in a complex directory structure to find files which contain a specific string within the file?

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2 Answers 2

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grep -H -R searchstring /directory

may want to redirect the results to a file (or tee)

You may also want to look at ack

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  • Note that not all versions of grep support the -R option.
    – gabe.
    Jun 14, 2011 at 17:49
  • if grep does not support -R you can allways do: cat /directory/* | grep -H searchstring
    – Wolfy
    Jun 15, 2011 at 6:37
  • @Wolfy, this is not the same, especially if you have a complex directory structure ... And -H does not help you here. Jun 15, 2011 at 19:31
  • sorry, my mistake...
    – Wolfy
    Jun 17, 2011 at 11:35
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    You can use find and xargs. find -print0 -type f | xargs -0 grep -H searchstring
    – user26112
    Apr 20, 2013 at 11:58
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Yes, there is grep. It has an option for recursive directory traversal, e.g.:

$ grep -r specificstring path

With GNU grep you can restrict the searched files with the --include and --exclude pattern options.

-H ('Print the file name for each match') is the default with -r, -R and when you specify multiple files on the command line. -R also turns on recursive directory traversal but also follows symbolic links.

You can also pipe the results of grep to less for screen paging.

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