Grep – How to Recurse for Files with Specific Extension

grep

Whenever I use grep with gnuwin32's recurse option -r and include a glob pattern for files to search (e.g. *.c), no files in the subdirectories are searched. I am using the latest grep from gnuwin32.

Specifically, I was searching for the string "iflag" in all my c source files in a directory.

grep -r iflag *.c

Best Answer

Grep's -r option (which is the same as the -R, --recursive, -d recurse and --directories=recurse options) takes a directory name (or pattern) as its argument. The command you are trying to execute should be interpreted as "Starting in the current working directory recurse all directories matching the pattern *.c. In each of those directories search all files for the string iflag."

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