How to perform a recursive grep on Linux, allowing you to search through files / sub directories for a specific string.
How to grep recursively
grep -r SEARCHSTRING /home/*
Enter your own search in the SEARCHSTRING above…
Say for example I am searching for the string class=”author” located somewhere in /var/www/wp-content/themes/your-theme. I would type the following at the shell prompt:
grep -r class="author" /var/www/wp-content/themes/your-theme/*
Grep will then output the string found in the file on the right and the file it’s located in on the left.
Example:
grep -r sub_rss theme/* theme/lib/functions/widgets.php: "sub_rss"
Note in the example above I am searching for the string sub_rss in the dir themes.