"grep -rnw": search for a string in all files

Question

I have been using the command mentioned in the answer of above question to search for string occurences in all files:

grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"

However lately I encountered a problem, shown in the following picture:

Looks like this command only recognizes strings that stand out as a word or something. How should I modify the command to improve my search result?

that other guy · Accepted Answer · 2016-08-09 20:02:18Z

explainshell helpfully explains your command, and gives an excerpt from man grep:

 -w, --word-regexp Select only those lines containing matches that form whole words.

So just remove -w since that explicitly does what you don't want:

grep -rn '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"

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