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Comment by tlarkworthy | Hacker News Reader

grep -r . "some random debug message" (searches for the passage recursively in all files from the directory it was executed, the main reason I like developing in linux more than windows)

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If you are searching inside code specifically, you may like 'ack'. It does the same thing grep does, except it has preset 'excludes', is recursive by default, and the output is a bit prettier.

Or even 'ag' (the silver searcher). Like ack, but "better". https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

"better" or just faster since its written in C ?

It is not a drop-in replacement for ack. e.g. there are some basic usages it does not support -- iirc counts (ag -c pattern).

Eh, faster is faster, does it matter why?

The part about written in C was just added on. My point was "better or faster". If you say "faster is better" I'll have to agree :)

Oh thanks! I will give it a whirl

    grep -rs

or (more commonly for me):-

    grep -rsi

(The -s supresses errors about unreadable files that may clutter the output. -i for case insensitivity.)

On windows

findstr /SPINC:"some random debug message" *

Will do the same. FINDSTR is no grep, but for very simple cases like this is just fine

SPINC and SPIMC are my favorite options...

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