Do the following: grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e 'pattern' -r or -R is recursive, -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. 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 a particular directory(ies) through --exclude-dir parameter. For example, this will exclude the dirs dir1/, dir2/…