How do I grep recursively?

Question

How do I recursively grep all directories and subdirectories?

find . | xargs grep "texthere" *

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

grep -r "texthere" . (notice period at the end)

(^credit: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1987928/1438029)

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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

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Alternatives

ack (http://beyondgrep.com/)

ag (http://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher)

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

The syntax is:
cd /path/to/dir
grep -r <"serch_word name"> .