All Uniq based operating systems contain a massively powerful command line interface that can let you do a lot of really cool things that you may not have realized. If you are looking for a piece of text in a huge directory of files, there is no need to go through each file and check. You can run a very simple command that will perform the search for you.

The following code will allow you to find a string inside a directory of files using any Linux/Unix based operating system using the Grep command. To make this command work correctly, make sure you are inside the directory that you wish to search.

grep -r 'mystring' *

If you wish to perform this command on a different directory that you are not currently inside, use the following command.

grep -r 'mystring' /var/myfolder

This will search for all files that contain ‘mystring’ inside the /var/myfolder directory. The -r argument will make this recursive so that it will also search all subdirectories. If you just want to search the top level directory, remove this -r command.