how to find a search term in source code

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IMHO there is a good answers on a similar question at “Unix & Linux”:

grep works on pure text and does not know anything about the
underlying syntax of your C program. Therefore, in order not search
inside comments you have several options:

  1. Strip C-comments before the search, you can do this using gcc
    -fpreprocessed -dD -E yourfile.c For details, please see Remove comments from C/C++ code

  2. Write/use some hacky half-working scripts like you have already found
    (e.g. they work by skipping lines starting with // or /*) in order to
    handle the details of all possible C/C++ comments (again, see the
    previous link for some scary testcases). Then you still may have false
    positives, but you do not have to preprocess anything.

  3. Use more advanced tools for doing “semantic search” in the code. I
    have found “coccigrep”: http://home.regit.org/software/coccigrep/ This
    kind of tools allows search for some specific language statements
    (i.e. an update of a structure with given name) and certainly they
    drop the comments.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/33136/158220

Although it doesn’t completely cover your “not in strings” requirement.

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