Text search with grep

GNU Grep is an amazingly powerful tool that will allow you to search input files containing specified patterns.

The following command performs a recursive search for a string, inside a directory of files:

grep -rnw '/path/to/search' -e 'pattern-to-find'

Breaking this command down:

• -r makes the execution recursive
• -n will give you the line number
• -w matches the whole word

You can use the --exclude switch to remove file patterns from the set of files included in your search. Removing js and html files from your search might look like this:

--exclude *.{js,html}

The opposite of this will be the --include switch.

For further details on this really useful tool, check out the man page.