How can I use grep to find a word inside a folder?

Question

In Windows, I would have done a search for finding a word inside a folder. Similarly, I want to know if a specific word occurs inside a directory containing many sub-directo

Answer 1

The following sample looks recursively for your search string in the *.xml and *.js files located somewhere inside the folders path1, path2 and path3.

grep -r --include=*.xml --include=*.js "your search string" path1 path2 path3

So you can search in a subset of the files for many directories, just providing the paths at the end.