How do I recursively grep all directories and subdirectories?

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.

Also:

find ./ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep "foo"

but grep -r is a better answer.

another syntax to grep a string in all files on a Linux system recursively

`grep -irn "string"

the -r indicates a recursive search that searches for the specified string in the given directory looking for the specified string in files, program, etc

-i ingnore case sensitive can be used to add inverted case string

-n prints the line number of the specified string

NB: this prints massive result to the console so you might need to filter the output by piping and remove less interesting bits of info

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.

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.

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

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

For .gz files, recursively scan all files and directories Change file type or put *

find . -name \*.gz -print0 | xargs -0 zgrep "STRING"