Unix: Search for file contents

Question

I find the find . -name "some-file" command very useful to list all files matching some file name in a folder. Is there anything similar I can use to list all files that contains string?

If you needed to find all files in a directory that had a certain string of text in it, what would you use?

Answer 1

If you don't need to search subdirectories:

grep -l "string" <pattern>

(<pattern> is a file glob pattern, eg *.txt)

Answer 2

Just in case you are using a system with a POSIX strictly compliant grep, ie which doesn't support the -r flag, but you still want to recurse in sub-directories, you can use this command:

find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec grep -l string {} +