How do I find all files containing specific text on Linux?

Question

I'm trying to find a way to scan my entire Linux system for all files containing a specific string of text. Just to clarify, I'm looking for text within the file, not in the file name. When I was looking up how to do this, I came across this solution twice: find / -type f -exec grep -H 'text-to-find-here' {} \\; However, it doesn't work. It seems to display every single file in the system. Is this close to the proper way to do it? If not, how should I? This ability to find text strings in files would be extraordinarily useful for some programming projects I'm doing.

Answer 1

Your code contains "grep -H", which prints names of those files, along with matching lines. You want grep -l (lowercase L), which prints the name of the file, without the matching lines.

Thus, this will work:

find / -type f -exec grep -l 'text-to-find-here' {} \;

Another way of doing this is:

grep -rl 'text-to-find-here' \