How to search in specific files matching a pattern

Use find to select the files then grep to search in the files:

find . -name "CMake*" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -F version

by using xargs, you do not have grep started for each and every file found.

Just to show that you can do this without having to enlist the help of find. You can make use of grep's ability to recurse the filesystem too. Assuming your version of grep has the -R switch:

$ grep -R version | awk -F: '/CMake.*:/ {print $1}'

Example

I created some sample data which included files named CMake1-3 which contained the string version, as well as a file named CMake0 which did not. I also created 2 files named afile that also contained the string version.

$ tree .
.
|-- CMake1
|-- dir1
|   |-- dirA1
|   |   `-- CMake1
|   |-- dirA2
|   `-- dirA3
|-- dir2
|   |-- dirA1
|   |   `-- CMake0
|   |-- dirA2
|   |   |-- afile
|   |   `-- CMake2
|   `-- dirA3
`-- dir3
    |-- dirA1
    |-- dirA2
    |   `-- afile
    `-- dirA3
        `-- CMake3

Now when I run the above command:

$ grep -R version | awk -F: '/CMake.*:/ {print $1}'
CMake1
dir2/dirA2/CMake2
dir3/dirA3/CMake3
dir1/dirA1/CMake1

Details

The above commands produces a list like this from grep:

$ grep -R version 
CMake1:version
dir2/dirA2/CMake2:version
dir2/dirA2/afile:version
dir3/dirA2/afile:version
dir3/dirA3/CMake3:version
dir1/dirA1/CMake1:version

And awk is used to find all the strings that contain CMake.*: and to split these strings on a colon (:), and to return just the first field from this split, i.e., the path of the name of a corresponding CMake* file.

2 grep's + PCRE

More modern versions of grep will often include what's called PCRE - Perl Compatible Regular Exprssions. So you could use 2 grep commands, with the 2nd one using PCRE to extract just the path portion of the file, omitting the trailing :version bit of the string from the 1st grep.

Example

$ grep -R version | grep -Po '.*CMake.*(?=:version)'
CMake1
dir2/dirA2/CMake2
dir3/dirA3/CMake3
dir1/dirA1/CMake1

The -o will return just the matching portion, while -P is what enables PCRE. Within the regular expression we're using a lookahead, (?=...), at the end to select only strings that have a trailing :version. This lookahead is only to help align our pattern, it isn't included in the results we return, nor is it part of the actual pattern we're grepping for, i.e. CMake.*.

Line numbers

You can also include the switch -n to the first grep so that the line number where the string version was encountered can also be included in the output.

Example

$ grep -Rn version | grep -Po '.*CMake.*(?=:version)'
CMake1:1
dir2/dirA2/CMake2:9
dir3/dirA3/CMake3:1
dir1/dirA1/CMake1:1

To make the first example work you'd need to change the awk commands slightly:

$ grep -Rn version | awk -F: '/CMake.*:/ {print $1":"$2}'  
CMake1:1
dir2/dirA2/CMake2:9
dir3/dirA3/CMake3:1
dir1/dirA1/CMake1:1

The first example gives you the opportunity though to move the line number around, since we've already parsed it into a separate field via awk.

Example

Here we can put the number first.

$ grep -Rn version | awk -F: '/CMake.*:/ {print $2":"$1}'  
1:CMake1
9:dir2/dirA2/CMake2
1:dir3/dirA3/CMake3
1:dir1/dirA1/CMake1

Use a combination of find an grep:

find . -name "Cmake*" -exec grep version {} \;

The example searches recursively from current directory and executes grep on the matching files.

find . -name "CMake*" -exec grep -H version {} \;