I like using

> grep -rn pattern dir

a lot because it returns all the result with the line numbers

I think its one of the most common use case of grep.

recently I started using

> grep -rl pattern dir

only returning the list of files, without the content appended.

I find that really useful

but when using -rl , -n is ignored, which is sad, because I could pipe in my editor and it would open the files at the proper line

for example

> grep -rln "[^a-z]if .\+ = .\+" app | xargs kate

unfortunately, the line numbers is not present on the grep output here

should you chose not to support this, then it should probably error out

cheers,

Mathieu Jobin