[absolutezero1287]

Ok, here's what happened. I accidentally deleted an encrypted folder. To solve this problem I used a few utilities to recover lost data from ext3 partitions. I sent all the recovered info to /media/external. I ended up with 67 folders worth of recovered media.
/media/external/recover.[1-67]

Each file within those subdirectories is in the form of fxxxxxxx.[txt | gz |html] with x being a number. I was wondering if I could use grep to search through all the files in all of these directories to locate an email address.

[tomdkat]

Yep. Use the "-r" option to recurse directories.

Run "man grep" to get the scoop on the many different things grep can do.

An example would be:

$ grep -r "tomdkat@techguy.org" /media/external/recover* | more

or

$ grep -r "tomdkat@techguy.org" /media/external/recover* > files.txt

There are also options to control the grep output, so you only get filenames or the filenames are omitted, etc.

Peace...

[absolutezero1287]

Thanks very much. Although I couldn't recover the encrypted file I was able to search through everything with relative ease.