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Recursively searching through all files in the current folder (aka the normal use case for grep) is accomplished by using "grep -r". It's on line 270 in "man gr

• jsight 12y ago
  I think a lot of people would hate having it be recursive by default.
• markrages 12y ago
  Recursive is not the default use for grep. stdin-stdout filtering is. "regexsearch" is more work to type and more space taken up everytime 'grep' appears in a command-line. And says nothing about recursion.
• gnaritas 12y ago
  Recursion is caused either by -R or -r on nearly all commands and is pretty standard, and r is virtually never the default on any command because that would be a bad idea. And yes, having to type regexsearch rather than grep would have been a bad idea; while grep isn't a great name it's far preferable to someone who types constantly. Search or find would have been better names, names need to be both short and descriptive on the command line, and short comes first.
• stephenr 12y ago
  Use the built-in search. Edit: the rest of my comment (somehow submitted to soon!) man grep /recurs<enter>
  • markrages 12y ago
    or use 'grep': $ man grep | grep recursive directory, recursively, following symbolic links only if they Exclude directories matching the pattern DIR from recursive -r, --recursive Read all files under each directory, recursively, following -R, --dereference-recursive Read all files under each directory, recursively. Follow all
• Pxtl 12y ago
  All the core unix tools have the problem of predating the vowel generation (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?VowelGeneration http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?VowelGeneration).
  • bcoates 12y ago
    'grep' isn't a case of disemvowelment (there's an e!), it's just a weird mnemonic that's outlived its referent.
• Retra 12y ago
  If it were up to me it would be called `find` and it would have flags to find files or text within files.