The ABC's of grep - R

R

Use the -r and -R flag to recursively​ search through directories. The only difference between the two is -R will follow symlinks in subdirectories.

Let’s suppose we have a subdirectory called alpha with a file named alpha.txt that contained the following:

// Located in ./alpha/alpha.txt
Hello alpha!

Use an asterisk to search through all files in the current directory.

$ grep "Hello" *
grep: alpha: Is a directory

Since alpha is a directory, use the -R flag to recursively search through it.

$ grep -R "Hello" *
alpha/alpha.txt:Hello alpha!