Question

So I’m trying to find backticks (`) in files, so I ran:

grep -irl '\`' ./*

This seems to return every single file possible…

What else can I try?

Answer 1

My apologies everyone, you have to use -I to ignore binary files. Those were the files that were being returned. I didn’t realize this until I removed -l, which indicated to me that the results were binary in nature.

grep -rlI '`' ./*

From the man page:

   -I     Process a binary file as if it did not contain  matching  data;
          this is equivalent to the --binary-files=without-match option.