word searching

[shadowfax]

If I have a bunch of files that is text, is there a command in the terminal that can search through the whole directory and output its results? Thank you.

 

[wyvern]

how about:
grep thing_to_search_for
I think it searches hte curent directory by default.

 

[rhg]

The grep command recoginzes some special characters to specify exactly where to search for your pattern. If you just want to look for a certain phrase use fgrep instead.

Search any file in the current directory:

fgrep "put your phrase here" *

Recursively search any file in the current directory and subdirectories:

fgrep -r "put your phrase here" .

For a case-insensitive search, add the -i option before the search phrase. To just output the file names containing the phrase add the -l option.

 

[shadowfax]

Thank you to both wyvern and rhg.