Finding all files in a directory containing a specific text in Linux

grep -rnw '/path/to/target/location/' -e 'search_string'

-r or -R is recursive,

-n is line number, and

-w stands for match the whole word.

-l (lower-case L) can be added to just give the file name of matching files.

Along with these, --exclude, --include, --exclude-dir flags could be used for efficient searching:

This will only search through those files which have .log or .out extensions:

grep --include=\*.{log,out} -rnw '/path/to/target/location/' -e "search_string"

This will exclude searching all the files ending with .txt extension:

grep --exclude=*.txt -rnw '/path/to/target/location/' -e "search_string"

For directories it's possible to exclude a particular directory(ies) through --exclude-dir parameter. For example, this will exclude the dirs dir1/, dir2/ and all of them matching *.dst/:

grep --exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,*.dst} -rnw '/path/to/target/location/' -e "search_string"

This works very well for me, to achieve almost the same purpose like yours.