Grep cheatsheet

Saturday, December 20, 2025 at 1:30 AM Coordinated Universal Time

grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e 'pattern'

-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. -e is the pattern used during the search

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 one or more directories using the --exclude-dir parameter. For example, this will exclude the dirs dir1/, dir2/ and all of them matching *.dst/:

grep --exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,*.dst} -rnw '/path/to/search/' -e "pattern"

This works very well for me, to achieve almost the same purpose like yours.

source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16956810/find-all-files-containing-a-specific-text-string-on-linux