- Open a terminal.
- Install ack-grep by typing sudo apt-get install ack-grep
- Change to the directory you want to search under, and type
ack-grep foo
- it lists out all the matches in all files under that directory.
- —
- If you don’t want to install additional software, you can simply use
grep
- in the terminal. To recursively search through directories, you can use the
-r
- option (see
man grep
- for details). The syntax you are looking for is probably:
grep -r "[STRING TO SEARCH FOR]" "[DIRECTORY TO SEARCH]"
So, for instance if I want to search for the string “asdf” in all files in all subdirectories of “/tmp/testdir/” the command looks like this:
grep -r "asdf" "/tmp/testdir/"
The quotation marks are not strictly necessary, but if your string or directory path contains whitespaces, you otherwise would have to mask them using the \ character…