How do I recursively grep all directories and subdirectories? find . | xargs grep "texthere" *

The command you provided is close, but it has a slight issue. The * at the end of the xargs grep command will only match files in the current directory, not in all subdirectories. To recursively grep through all directories and subdirectories, you should modify the command slightly. Here's the correct command:

find . -type f -exec grep -H "texthere" {} +

Let's break down what each part of the command does:

    find .: This command searches for files and directories starting from the current directory (.).
    -type f: This specifies that you're only interested in files (not directories).
    -exec: This option tells find to execute a command on the files it finds.
    grep -H "texthere" {} +: This part is the command that will be executed for each found file. It uses grep to search for the specified text ("texthere") in the file contents. The -H option ensures that the filename is printed along with the matching line. The {} is a placeholder that gets replaced with the current file being processed. The + at the end of the -exec command is used to group multiple files together and pass them as arguments to a single grep command, which is more efficient than invoking grep for each file separately.

Here's an example of how you would use this command:
Suppose you have the following directory structure:

my_directory/
├── file1.txt
├── file2.txt
└── subdirectory/
    ├── file3.txt
    └── subsubdirectory/
        └── file4.txt
 
If you want to search for the text "texthere" in all these files and subdirectories, you would navigate to the my_directory directory in your terminal and then run the command:

find . -type f -exec grep -H "texthere" {} +
 
This would search for the text "texthere" in file1.txt, file2.txt, file3.txt, and file4.txt, and it would print the matching lines along with the filenames.