Using globs in GNU grep's path argument

Question

BSD (Mac) grep allows for this command:

grep -n "FIXME" **/*.rb

But GNU grep forces me to specify at least a folder to start from:

grep -n "FIXME" {lib,spec}/**/*.rb

Is there a way to get this to behave like it does in BSD grep?

Answer 1

Switch to ack. It uses the recursive strategy by default, and comes with loads of tricky regexes for types of language files available as flags.

For instance, writing:

ack FIXME --ruby

Will search the current directory recursively for anything that may be a Ruby file. This will work the same on Mac and Linux.