Linux : Find all files containing specific text on Linux

The most common requirement these days is to find something that you have saved sometime ago in some file in a discrete folder, most importantly he one which you dont remember currently.Windows is pretty staright forward that everyone knows how to serach a file and I will not bore you with details.

However Linux is a different game when it comes to searching files and its contents. We will see a command that will let us do that work in simple and easy to remember manner.

            grep -rnw '/path/to/folder/' -e 'string'               

-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.

Along with above options a few others like , --exclude, --include, --exclude-dir or --include-dir flags could be used for more efficient searching:


This below command will only search through the files which have .properties or .sh extensions:

           grep --include=\*.{properties,sh} -rnw '/path/to/folder/' -e "string"       

This below command will exclude searching all the files ending with .txt extension:

            grep --exclude=*.txt -rnw '/path/to/folder/' -e "string"                           

Just like exclude files, it's possible to exclude/include directories through --exclude-dir and --include-dir parameter. For example, this will exclude the dirs dir1/, dir2/ and all of them matching *.ext/:

            grep --exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,*.ext} -rnw '/path/to/folder/' -e "string"     

Hope you got what you came for.