If you want to find specific text in a given directory recursively, the best way to do it would be with the grep command and a pattern.
Just like that:
grep -ri something *
-r or -R is recursive,
-i to ignore the case
-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 .c or .h extensions:
grep –include=\*.{c,h} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
This will exclude searching all the files ending with .o extension:
grep –exclude=*.o -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
For directories it’s possible to exclude a particular directory(ies) through –exclude-dir parameter.
grep –exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,*.dst} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
For more options check man grep.