Adding to my TIL series.
I working on building an set of addon(s) for a rather large and complex opensource project. While trying to tweak some confugration, I wanted to be able to find all the files - where the configuration values were being picked up from. Being my lazy self today, and not in the mood to read through all the documentation – I'm going to use grep to help me find all the config files.
grep -rnw '/path/to/the/project/root/' -e 'pattern'
-ror-Ris recursive,-nis line number, and-wstands 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/the/project/root/' -e "pattern"
This will exclude searching all the files ending with .o extension:
grep --exclude=*.o -rnw '/path/to/the/project/root/' -e "pattern"
For directories it's possible to exclude one or more directories using the --exclude-dir parameter. For example, this will exclude the dirs dir1/, dir2/ and all of them matching *.dst/:
grep --exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,*.dst} -rnw '/path/to/the/project/root/' -e "pattern"
This worked very well for what I was looking for.