I started working my first job as a full time professional software developer recently, and frequently find myself having to search through a seemingly enormous codebase to try and find things. This function is defined here but… where in this 50,000+ lines of code is it actually called and executed?

At first I tried using Azure DevOps built-in search functionality to search through our repository, but this really just hasn’t been working. Often times I find myself searching for a function after looking at it’s definition, and the Azure DevOps search bar will not be able to find where the function is actually called.

So here is the solution I’ve stumbled upon, which I’m sure industry vets all know about already: grep

That’s it! That’s the answer to your woes if you are having trouble searching through a large codebase. Simply fire up a terminal window on your Mac, navigate to your project’s directory, and enter the following magical command:

$ cd ~/yourSuperSweetProjectDirectory

$ grep -r -i someTextYouAreLookingFor *