ILRI Research Computing

Ever need to search through all your files for a certain word or phrase? You probably know about the grep command, but did you know it's recursive?

Here's an example. In this case we're searching for the word "modules":

grep -r "modules" .

By using the "-r" switch, we're telling grep to scan files in the current directory and all sub-directories. It will return a list of files the string was found in, and a copy of the line it was found on.

If you'd rather just get the file names and skip the rest of the output, use the "-l" switch, like so:

grep -lr "modules" .

Here's another tip: grep also supports regular expressions, so matching against a wildcard pattern is easy:

grep -lr "mod.*" .

That command will print a list of files containing any word starting with "mod".

You can also use grep to search for multiple words:

grep -r "drupal\|joomla\|wordpress" .

And, of course, grep supports file name wildcards in the standard unix fashion. In this example, grep will search only file names starting with "log":

grep -lr "mod.*" ./log*

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