How do I grep recursively

Question

How do I recursively grep all directories and subdirectories   find     xargs grep  texthere

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Here s a recursive  tested lightly with bash and sh  function that traverses all subfolders of a given folder   1  and using grep searches for given string   3  in given files   2      cat script sh    bin sh  cd   1   loop          for i in       do         if   -d   i            then               echo entering   i              cd   i              loop   1    2          fi     done      if   -f   1        then         grep -l   2    PWD  1      fi      cd       loop   2    3    Running it and an example output     sh script start folder filename search string  home james start folder dir2 filename

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If you are looking for a specific content in all files from a directory structure  you may use find since it is more clear what you are doing   find -type f -exec grep -l  texthere         Note that -l  downcase of L  shows the name of the file that contains the text  Remove it if you instead want to print the match itself  Or use -H to get the file together with the match  All together  other alternatives are   find -type f -exec grep -Hn  texthere         Where -n prints the line number

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For  gz files  recursively scan all files and directories Change file type or put   find   -name    gz -print0   xargs -0 zgrep  quot STRING quot

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Throwing my two cents here  As others already mentioned grep -r doesn t work on every platform  This may sound silly but I always use git   git grep  texthere    Even if the directory is not staged  I just stage it and use git grep

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In 2018  you want to use ripgrep or the-silver-searcher because they are way faster than the alternatives   Here is a directory with 336 first-level subdirectories     find   -maxdepth 1 -type d   wc -l      336    time rg -w aggs -g    py      rg -w aggs -g    py   1 24s user 2 23s system 283  cpu 1 222 total    time ag -w aggs -G    py       ag -w aggs -G    py    2 71s user 1 55s system 116  cpu 3 651 total    time find    -type f -name    py    xargs grep -w aggs     find    -type f -name    py   1 34s user 5 68s system 32  cpu 21 329 total xargs grep -w aggs  6 65s user 0 49s system 32  cpu 22 164 total   On OSX  this installs ripgrep  brew install ripgrep  This installs silver-searcher  brew install the silver searcher

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To find name of files with path recursively containing the particular string use below command for UNIX   find     xargs grep  searched-string    for Linux   grep -r  searched-string      find a file on UNIX server   find   -type f -name file name   find a file on LINUX server  find   -name file name

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just the filenames can be useful too  grep -r -l  foo

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Also   find    -type f -print0   xargs -0 grep  foo    but grep -r is a better answer

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grep -r  texthere     notice period at the end     credit  https   stackoverflow com a 1987928 1438029     Clarification   grep -r  texthere     recursively grep all directories and subdirectories   grep -r  texthere     recursively grep these directories and subdirectories   grep recursive     grep  options  PATTERN  FILE           options       -R  -r  --recursive      Read all files under each directory  recursively       This is equivalent to the -d recurse or --directories recurse option       http   linuxcommand org man pages grep1 html   grep help    grep --help    grep --help  grep recursive   -r  --recursive           like --directories recurse   -R  --dereference-recursive     Alternatives  ack  http   beyondgrep com    ag  http   github com ggreer the silver searcher

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This should work   grep -R  texthere

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In my IBM AIX Server  OS version  AIX 5 2   use   find    -type f -print -exec grep -n -i  stringYouWannaFind           this will print out path file name and  relative line number in the file like     inc xxxx x h  2865        Description    stringYouWannaFind       anyway it works for me

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Below are the command for search a String recursively on Unix and Linux environment   for UNIX command is   find   -name  string to be searched  -exec grep  text            for Linux command is   grep -r  string to be searched

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I now always use  even on Windows with GoW -- Gnu on Windows    grep --include    xxx  -nRHI  my Text to grep      That includes the following options   --include PATTERN      Recurse in directories only searching file matching PATTERN    -n  --line-number      Prefix each line of output with the line number within its input file     Note  phuclv adds in the comments that  -n decreases performance a lot so  so you might want to skip that option   -R  -r  --recursive      Read all files under each directory  recursively  this is equivalent to the -d recurse option    -H  --with-filename      Print the filename for each match    -I           Process a binary file as if it did not  contain  matching data    this is equivalent to the --binary-files without-match option    And I can add  i   -nRHIi   if I want case-insensitive results   I can get    home vonc gitpoc passenger gitlist github  grep --include    php  -nRHI  hidden    src GitList Application php 43              git hidden         gt   config- gt get  git    hidden      config- gt get  git    hidden     array    src GitList Provider GitServiceProvider php 21              options  hidden      app  git hidden    tests InterfaceTest php 32          options  hidden     array self   tmpdir     hiddenrepo    vendor klaussilveira gitter lib Gitter Client php 20     protected  hidden  vendor klaussilveira gitter lib Gitter Client php 170        Get hidden repository list vendor klaussilveira gitter lib Gitter Client php 176         return  this- gt hidden

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I guess this is what you re trying to write  grep myText   find      and this may be something else helpful if you want to find the files grep hit   grep myText   find      cut -d   -f 1   sort   uniq

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In POSIX systems  you don t find -r parameter for grep and your grep -rn  stuff    won t run  but if you use find command it will   find   -type f -exec grep -n  stuff        -print  Agreed by Solaris and HP-UX

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If you only want to follow actual directories  and not symbolic links    grep -r  thingToBeFound  directory   If you want to follow symbolic links as well as actual directories  be careful of infinite recursion     grep -R  thing to be found  directory   Since you re trying to grep recursively  the following options may also be useful to you   -H  outputs the filename with the line  -n  outputs the line number in the file   So if you want to find all files containing Darth Vader in the current directory or any subdirectories and capture the filename and line number  but do not want the recursion to follow symbolic links  the command would be  grep -rnH  Darth Vader      If you want to find all mentions of the word cat in the directory    home adam Desktop TomAndJerry    and you re currently in the directory    home adam Desktop WorldDominationPlot   and you want to capture the filename but not the line number of any instance of the string  cats   and you want the recursion to follow symbolic links if it finds them  you could run either of the following  grep -RH  cats     TomAndJerry                    relative directory  grep -RH  cats   home adam Desktop TomAndJerry    absolute directory   Source   running  grep --help   A short introduction to symbolic links  for anyone reading this answer and confused by my reference to them  https   www nixtutor com freebsd understanding-symbolic-links

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This is the one that worked for my case on my current machine  git bash on windows 7    find    -type f -iname    cs  -print0   xargs -0 grep  content pattern    I always forget the -print0 and -0 for paths with spaces   EDIT  My preferred tool is now instead ripgrep  https   github com BurntSushi ripgrep releases   It s really fast and has better defaults  like recursive by default   Same example as my original answer but using ripgrep  rg -g    cs   content pattern

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For a list of available flags   grep --help    Returns all matches for the regexp texthere in the current directory  with the corresponding line number   grep -rn  texthere      Returns all matches for texthere  starting at the root directory  with the corresponding line number and ignoring case    grep -rni  texthere      flags used here    -r recursive   -n print line number with output  -i ignore case

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Just for fun  a quick and dirty search of   txt files if the  christangrant answer is too much to type  -   grep -r texthere   grep  txt

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The syntax is  cd  path to dir grep -r  lt  serch word name  gt

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If you know the extension or pattern of the file you would like  another method is to use --include option   grep -r --include    txt  texthere     You can also mention files to exclude with --exclude   Ag  If you frequently search through code  Ag  The Silver Searcher  is a much faster alternative to grep  that s customized for searching code  For instance  it s recursive by default and automatically ignores files and directories listed in  gitignore  so you don t have to keep passing the same cumbersome exclude options to grep or find

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globbing     Using grep -r works  but it may overkill  especially in large folders   For more practical usage  here is the syntax which uses globbing syntax        grep  texthere       txt   which greps only specific files with pattern selected pattern  It works for supported shells such as Bash  4 or zsh   To activate this feature  run  shopt -s globstar   See also  How do I find all files containing specific text on Linux   git grep  For projects under Git version control  use   git grep  pattern    which is much quicker   ripgrep  For larger projects  the quickest grepping tool is ripgrep which greps files recursively by default   rg  pattern      It s built on top of Rust s regex engine which uses finite automata  SIMD and aggressive literal optimizations to make searching very fast  Check the detailed analysis here

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grep -r  texthere      The first parameter represents the regular expression to search for  while the second one represents the directory that should be searched  In this case    means the current directory   Note  This works for GNU grep  and on some platforms like Solaris you must specifically use GNU grep as opposed to legacy implementation   For Solaris this is the ggrep command

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ag is my favorite way to do this now github com ggreer the silver searcher   It s basically the same thing as ack but with a few more optimizations   Here s a short benchmark  I clear the cache before each test  cf https   askubuntu com questions 155768 how-do-i-clean-or-disable-the-memory-cache    ryan 3G08  sync  amp  amp  echo 3   sudo tee  proc sys vm drop caches 3 ryan 3G08  time grep -r  hey ya     real    0m9 458s user    0m0 368s sys 0m3 788s ryan 3G08   sync  amp  amp  echo 3   sudo tee  proc sys vm drop caches 3 ryan 3G08  time ack-grep  hey ya     real    0m6 296s user    0m0 716s sys 0m1 056s ryan 3G08  sync  amp  amp  echo 3   sudo tee  proc sys vm drop caches 3 ryan 3G08  time ag  hey ya     real    0m5 641s user    0m0 356s sys 0m3 444s ryan 3G08  time ag  hey ya     test without first clearing cache  real    0m0 154s user    0m0 224s sys 0m0 172s

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Note that find   -type f   xargs grep whatever sorts of solutions will run into  Argument list to long  errors when there are too many files matched by find   The best bet is grep -r but if that isn t available  use find   -type f -exec grep -H whatever       instead

[linux] How do I grep recursively?

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