Search through text files in Mac OS X

Question

Is there a way to search through all the text files in a folder (and subfolders) for a specific string or bit of text in Mac OS X?

Answer 1

You can't do this from the spotlight icon in the menu bar. But you can do it with spotlight:

1. Navigate to the folder in the finder.

2. Type your search in the search bar on the top right of the folder.

3. There is a line above the results that says:

Search: This Mac "Your Folder Name"

Click on the name of your folder to restrict the search to the folder instead of the whole computer, which is what the default selection "This Mac" does.

Then click the gear icon, choose show search criteria, and change the kind to text files.

Answer 2

Or if you prefer the commandline,

grep "my string of text" -R .

You'll need to be (or get) familiar with grep.

Hm. Can't get to my OS X system to double check this, but another way to do it if OS X's grep doesn't support -R would be:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep "my string of text"

Answer 3

In the upper right hand corner of your screen: [Spotlight][1] Or, [BBEdit][2] supports great search, too, in files and folders.

[1]: Mac 101: Spotlight

[2]: BBEdit