Recursive Find-in-Files on Linux or Unix

Recursive Find-in-Files on Linux or Unix

I find myself needing this more and more often lately, so I figured this is as good a place as any to keep track of it. Here's how to recursively search for files containing a particular string or regular expression. This should work on most Linux or UNIX systems, depending on your configuration.

    find -type f -name "*" | xargs grep 'word, phrase, or regular expression'

Summary for the curious:

find returns the names of one or more files, but not their contents.
-type f tells find to only look at files, not directories.
-name "*" tells find to examine everything. You can replace this with "*.js" to only search JavaScript files, for example.
| "pipes" the output of the command on the left to the input of the command on the right.
xargs creates and executes a command based on the arguments you pass to it.
grep searches the contents of files and returns each line that is a match.
'...' is a regular expression (or just a word, if you prefer) that indicates what you are searching for.

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