This discussion (particularly my final globtree recipe) made me realise that the exact same approach would greatly improve the usability of the all_paths, file_paths and dir_paths iterators in walkdir [1]. Accordingly, walkdir 0.4 will let you write a recursive grep for ReST and Python source files as:

    file_paths(top, included_files="*.py *.rst".split())

Scanning multiple directories will be as simple as:

    file_paths(dir1, dir2, included_files="*.py *.rst".split())

[1] https://bitbucket.org/ncoghlan/walkdir/issue/15