Exclude .Svn Directories from Grep

Exclude .svn directories from grep

If you have GNU Grep, it should work like this:

grep --exclude-dir=".svn"

If happen to be on a Unix System without GNU Grep, try the following:

grep -R "whatever you like" *|grep -v "\.svn/*" 

How can I exclude directories from grep -R?

SOLUTION 1 (combine find and grep)

The purpose of this solution is not to deal with grep performance but to show a portable solution : should also work with busybox or GNU version older than 2.5.

Use find, for excluding directories foo and bar :

find /dir \( -name foo -prune \) -o \( -name bar -prune \) -o -name "*.sh" -print

Then combine find and the non-recursive use of grep, as a portable solution :

find /dir \( -name node_modules -prune \) -o -name "*.sh" -exec grep --color -Hn "your text to find" {} 2>/dev/null \;

SOLUTION 2 (using the --exclude-dir option of grep):

You know this solution already, but I add it since it's the most recent and efficient solution. Note this is a less portable solution but more human-readable.

grep -R --exclude-dir=node_modules 'some pattern' /path/to/search

To exclude multiple directories, use --exclude-dir as:

--exclude-dir={node_modules,dir1,dir2,dir3}

SOLUTION 3 (Ag)

If you frequently search through code, Ag (The Silver Searcher) is a much faster alternative to grep, that's customized for searching code. For instance, it automatically ignores files and directories listed in .gitignore, so you don't have to keep passing the same cumbersome exclude options to grep or find.

How can I get `find` to ignore .svn directories?

For searching, can I suggest you look at ack ? It's a source-code aware find, and as such will automatically ignore many file types, including source code repository info such as the above.

excluding .svn .git files from find+xargs+grep pipe

find . -type d '(' -name .svn -o -name .git ')' -prune -o -type f -exec grep -nH -e 'thing' {} +

Using -prune to avoid recursing into .svn and .git directories is better than using a regex. Also -exec is preferable to -print0 | xargs -0.

Use grep --exclude/--include syntax to not grep through certain files

Use the shell globbing syntax:

grep pattern -r --include=\*.cpp --include=\*.h rootdir

The syntax for --exclude is identical.

Note that the star is escaped with a backslash to prevent it from being expanded by the shell (quoting it, such as --include="*.cpp", would work just as well). Otherwise, if you had any files in the current working directory that matched the pattern, the command line would expand to something like grep pattern -r --include=foo.cpp --include=bar.cpp rootdir, which would only search files named foo.cpp and bar.cpp, which is quite likely not what you wanted.

Update 2021-03-04

I've edited the original answer to remove the use of brace expansion, which is a feature provided by several shells such as Bash and zsh to simplify patterns like this; but note that brace expansion is not POSIX shell-compliant.

The original example was:

grep pattern -r --include=\*.{cpp,h} rootdir

to search through all .cpp and .h files rooted in the directory rootdir.

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