grep tips

If you’re looking for lines matching in files, my favorite command is:

grep -Hrn 'search term' path/to/files

-H causes the filename to be printed (implied when multiple files are searched)
-r does a recursive search
-n causes the line number to be printed
path/to/files can be . to search in the current directory

Further options that I find very useful:

-I ignore binary files (complement: -a treat all files as text)
-F treat search term as a literal, not a regular expression
-i do a case-insensitive search
--color=always to force colors even when piping through less. To make less support colors, you need to use the -r option:

grep -Hrn search . | less -r
--exclude-dir=dir useful for excluding directories like .svn and .git.

If you just want to skip gzip files:

 grep -rI --exclude="\.gz" 9000 /usr *