# A Really Useful Git Command For Quickly Searching Text

In this article, we will see a very useful command to search for a particular text inside a project code.

Many times when working on code, you want to find out where in the repository a particular text is used, either to replace it with other text or for debugging purposes.

If you try to use a global search in your favorite IDE like Visual Studio Code or Sublime Text, you will get the text you are searching in hundreds or thousands of files including `package.json`, `package-lock.json`, and other unnecessary files.

Instead, you can use the `git grep` command to quickly search within files.

So let’s dive into it.

---

Suppose, you want to find the files in which a particular package like `require("express")` or `require('express')` is used. j

Just using a global search for express in VS Code will give many results, instead, we can run the following command from a terminal from your project folder:

```js
git grep -n $'require([\'"]express[\'"]'
```

The above command will list out the filename, line number along with the matching text from that file.

This will produce the output as shown below:

![express_output1.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1618812310877/sJTyrgCjg.png)

---

Suppose you want to find in which files, a particular property like `http_mode` from the `app` object is used. 

In short, if you want to find the occurrence of `.http_mode` you can execute the following command:

```js
git grep $'\.http_mode'
```

This will produce the output as shown below:

![git_output.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1618812388832/I1MONm_Ue.png)

---

If you want to find the text `NavLink` only in a particular directory instead of all the directories, you can execute the following command:

```js
grep -rn src/routes -e NavLink
```

This will produce the output as shown below:

![git_output1.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1618812451402/PHrEQ3v8_.png)

### Thanks for reading!

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