`-r` or `-R` is recursive,
`-n` is line number, and
`-w` stands for match the whole word.
`-l` (lower-case L) can be added to just give the file name of matching files.
Along with these, `--exclude`, `--include`, `--exclude-dir` flags could be used for efficient searching:
This will only search through those files which have .c or .h extensions:
`grep --include=\*.{c,h} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"`
This will exclude searching all the files ending with .o extension:
`grep --exclude=*.o -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"`
For directories it's possible to exclude a particular directory(ies) through `--exclude-dir` parameter. For example, this will exclude the dirs dir1/, dir2/ and all of them matching *.dst/:
`grep --exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,*.dst} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"`
This works very well for me, to achieve almost the same purpose like yours.