Is there a way to search in only properties file when using grep?

Question

I am normally searching like this

grep -rnws '/path/to/directory/' -e 'JMSAppender'

However this does display all jar files and class files where it might be used. I need to check only inside log4j properties in each projects.

Is there anyway to grep only properties files inside certain directories?

Answer 1

Assuming you’re using GNU grep, you can specify globs to match against with --include:

grep -rnws --include '*.properties' '/path/to/directory/' -e 'JMSAppender'

The pattern must be quoted to ensure the shell doesn’t try to process it.