grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e 'pattern'-ror-Ris recursive,-nis line number, and-wstands for match the whole word.-l(lower-case L) can be added to just give the file name of matching files.
Along with these, --exclude, --include, --exclude-dir flags could be used for efficient searching:
- This will only search through those files which have .c or .h extensions:
grep --include=\*.{c,h} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern" - This will exclude searching all the files ending with .o extension:
grep --exclude=*.o -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern" - For directories, it’s possible to exclude a particular directory(ies) through
--exclude-dirparameter. For example, this will exclude the dirs dir1/, dir2/ and all of them matching *.dst/:grep --exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,*.dst} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
This works very well for me, to achieve almost the same purpose like yours.
For more options check man grep