Search a Batch of Files for a Line of Text

Question

I have a Mercurial Repository for a code project and I want to search all of the files, in all directories and sub-directories, for a given string. What is the best method, or program to do so?

I can conduct this search in Ubuntu Linux or a Windows environment.

Answer 1

Probably best to just do a checkout of the repository and use grepWin on windows, or grep on Linux.

Answer 2

For a simple search in the working copy, I would also use the normal grep program (I'm on Linux).

But if you want to search the history for a string, then note that Mercurial also has a hg grep function. That can be handy if you want to see when a given function, say, was introduced or removed.