I need help please. I'm relatively new to Linux, and I'd like to use grep to search for a pattern in files under several folders.

I'd like to find MyFunction in *.C files under MyRoot folder. The MyRoot folder itself doesn't contain any *.C file, however the sub-folders below it contain some *.C files.

This is what I did:
/Code/MyRoot$ grep -r MyFunction *.c

It complained that no *.c file or directory. However if I use:

/Code/MyRoot$ grep -r MyFunction .

It works, but it will find MyFunction in other type of files too (*.h, *.html) which sometimes I don't want.

Can someone tell me how to accomplish this please? Thanks.

Also, I'm used to working with C-code in MS-Windows environment using CodeWright. I'm trying to transition to Linux and would like to use gVim as my editor. Any clue on the best way to make this transition?

My primary goal is basically to be able to search some keywords or pattern within files spread out in multiple folders and jump to that file quickly and display it using gVim.

Thanks again.

Hi
About the recursive search: really weird that "grep -r" or "grep -R" does not work on your system.
Anyway alternatively you could use "find". E.g. ...
... will search all *.c files in all the subdirectories of the current directory and if any are found, it will execute on each of them the "grep" command. In AIX the "-l" flag of grep will display the filename instead of its contents, I don't have right now a Linux-system where to check which flag is used in there.

It does work. The problem is that the *.c is evaluated
by the SHELL, not by grep. In other words: if there's NO
.c file in the current directory, it will complain as he
described it. Should there happen to be some, it will only
search those files.

Really the approach with find -exec grep is the most
feasible solution.




Cheers,
Tink

Or maybe use egrep instead...

I'm curious.

How does that prevent the shell globbing *.c?




Cheers,
Tink

The solution from PearlSeattle works. Thanks a lot.

You're welcome.
Could eventually work as well with

grep -r mytext "*.c"

This should prevent your shell from expanding the *.c into filenames if you already have in your source directory blabla.c-files.
Greetings