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date 2009-11-22
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title Use grep to search multiple files at once

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`grep` lets you search through multiple text files at once.

I recently removed a feature from a project and wanted to make sure I removed all references to it. With grep it was easy:

code
 grep -r picture *

This searched all the files in my current directory as well as all the files in each subdirectory, and printed the filename and line where the word "picture" appeared.

Then I went in and changed the 2 files that needed modifying.

Had I wanted to just search the current directory (without the subdirectories) I could have done:

code
 grep picture *.*

This would have searched through all the files in the current directory.

Had I wanted to search in just 1 specific file:

code
 grep picture filename.txt

Had I wanted to do a case insensitive search:

code
 grep -ir picture *

Had I wanted to exclude a directory and done a case insensitive search:

code
 grep -ri "searchstring" --exclude="*\.svn*" *

(grep uses regular expressions)

# Links
- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep">grep</a> on Wikipedia
- <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/221921/grep-exclude-include-syntax-do-not-grep-through-certain-files">Stackoverflow</a> grep help

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