Do the following:
grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e 'pattern'
-r
or-R
is recursive,-n
is line number, and-w
stands for match the whole word.-l
(lower-case L) can be added to just give the file name of matching files.-i
stands for ignore case (optional in your case).
Along with these, --exclude
, --include
, --exclude-dir
flags could be used for efficient searching:
- This will only search through those files which have .c or .h extensions:
grep --include=\*.{c,h} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
- This will exclude searching all the files ending with .o extension:
grep --exclude=\*.o -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
- For directories it’s possible to exclude one or more directories using the
--exclude-dir
parameter. For example, this will exclude the dirs dir1/, dir2/ and all of them matching *.dst/:grep --exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,*.dst} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
This works very well for me, to achieve almost the same purpose like yours.
For more options check man grep
.