Find all files containing a specific text (string) on Linux?

Question

How do I find all files containing a specific string of text within their file contents?

The following doesn't work. It seems to display every single file in the system.

find / -type f -exec grep -H 'text-to-find-here' {} \;

Answer 1

Do the following:

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

• -r or -R is recursive ; use -R to search entirely
• -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.

For more options, see man grep.