I'm unable to use grep to find strings in a file?

Question

As i use grep

E.g: grep -iL or -ir /directoryname

It just displays all the file-names and when i opened them it doesn't have the relevant specified string in it. I want to know does grep really work. Or I want to change to something else.

Answer 1

It is working fine..

example:

grep -ir "XDG" ~/.config
.config/user-dirs.dirs:# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update
.config/user-dirs.dirs:# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped
.config/user-dirs.dirs:# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an
.config/user-dirs.dirs:XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
.config/user-dirs.dirs:XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
.config/user-dirs.dirs:XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
.config/user-dirs.dirs:XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
.config/user-dirs.dirs:XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
.config/user-dirs.dirs:XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
.config/user-dirs.dirs:XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
.config/user-dirs.dirs:XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"