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-directories and files  My searches for grep syntax shows I must specify the filename  i e  grep string filename  Now  I do not know the filename  so what do I do  A friend suggested to do grep -nr string  but I don t know what this means and I got no results with it  there is no response until I issue a Ctrl   C

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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

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Don t use grep  Download Silver Searcher or ripgrep  They re both outstanding  and way faster than grep or ack with tons of options

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Run terminal  the following command inside the directory  It will recursively check inside subdirectories too   grep -r  your string goes here

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grep -r  yourstring    Will find  yourstring  in any files and folders    Now if you want to look for two different strings at the same time you can always use option E and add words for the search  example after the break   grep -rE  yourstring yourotherstring      will search for list locations where yourstring or yourotherstring matches

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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

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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

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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

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grep -nr  yourString       The dot at the end searches the current directory  Meaning for each parameter   -n            Show relative line number in the file  yourString   String for search  followed by a wildcard character -r            Recursively search subdirectories listed               Directory for search  current directory    grep -nr  MobileAppSer       Would find MobileAppServlet java or MobileAppServlet class or MobileAppServlet txt   MobileAppASer     is another way to do the same thing    To check more parameters use man grep command

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grep -R  string   directory    -R follows also symlinks when -r does not

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Why not do a recursive search to find all instances in sub directories   grep -r  text      This works like a charm

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Similar to the answer posted by  eLRuLL  a easier way to specify a search that respects word boundaries is to use the -w option   grep -wnr  yourString

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There s also   find directory name -type f -print0   xargs -0 grep -li word   but that might be a bit much for a beginner   find is a general purpose directory walker lister  -type f means  look for plain files rather than directories and named pipes and what have you   -print0 means  print them on the standard output using null characters as delimiters   The output from find is sent to xargs -0 and that grabs its standard input in chunks  to avoid command line length limitations  using null characters as a record separator  rather than the standard newline  and the applies grep -li word to each set of files  On the grep  -l means  list the files that match  and -i means  case insensitive   you can usually combine single character options so you ll see -li more often than -l -i   If you don t use -print0 and -0 then you ll run into problems with file names that contain spaces so using them is a good habit

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The following sample looks recursively for your search string in the   xml and   js files located somewhere inside the folders path1  path2 and path3   grep -r --include   xml --include   js  your search string  path1 path2 path3   So you can search in a subset of the files for many directories  just providing the paths at the end

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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

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

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