recursive grep: exclude specific directories

I use recursive grep a lot to find source files with specific content.

grep -Rni "myfunc" .

On large codebases, this can get slow, so I use --incldue to restrict/whitelist extensions.

grep -Rni --include=*.java "myfunc" .

However, it would be more efficient to exclude (prune) whole subdirectories, I'm thinking:

grep -Rni --exclude=/.svn/ "myfunc" .

But the --exclude only supports file patterns like *.java above. How can I exclude directories?

6 Answers

You might look into ack.

I've just started using it but it seems well-suited for this.

2

grep -r --exclude-dir=dev --exclude-dir=sys --exclude-dir=proc PATTERN data

Source:

4

you can use find instead:

find . -not -path "*/.svn*" -not -type d -exec grep -ni "myfunc" {} \; -print

OK, so that's a little backwards, you get the grep results first and then the path. Maybe someoe else has a better answer?

2

Here's a full example from a script in one of my projects that might help, I call this file "all_source" (marked as executable) and put it in my project's root dir then call it like grep myfunc $(./all_source) the sort at the end of the script is totally optional.

#!/bin/bash
find . \ -type d \( \ -wholename './lib' -o \ -wholename './vc6' -o \ -name 'gen' -o \ -name '.svn' \ \) -prune -o \ -type f \( \ -name '*.h' -o \ -name '*.cpp' -o \ -name '*.c' -o \ -name '*.lua' -o \ -name '*.*awk' \) -print \ | sort

This script returns all the file names in the project that match *.h, *.cpp, *.c, *.lua, *.*awk, but doesn't search in all folders named .svn and gen folders as well as skipping the folders for ./lib and ./vc6 (but only the ones right off the project root). So when you do grep myfunc $(./all_source) it only greps in those files. You'll need to call this from the root dir of the project as well.

There is also the -prune option to find:

 find . -path "*/.svn*" -prune -o -not -type d -exec grep -ni "myfunc" {} \; -print

You can try doing this:

grep -R "myfunc" . | grep -v path_to_exclude/

Eg: If you don't want to search the content in log files just do the following:

grep -R "myfunc" . | grep -v log/

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