Exclude .svn directories from grep [duplicate]

Answer 1

psychoschlumpf is correct, but it only works if you have the latest version of grep. Earlier versions do not have the --exclude-dir option. However, if you have a very large codebase, double-grep-ing can take forever. Drop this in your .bashrc for a portable .svn-less grep:

alias sgrep='find . -path "*/.svn" -prune -o -print0 | xargs -0 grep'

Now you can do this:

sgrep some_var

... and get expected results.

Of course, if you're an insane person like me who just has to use the same .bashrc everywhere, you could spend 4 hours writing an overcomplicated bash function to put there instead. Or, you could just wait for an insane person like me to post it online:

http://gist.github.com/573928

Answer 2

On my GNU grep 2.5, --exclude-dirs is not a valid option. As an alternative, this worked well for me:

grep --exclude="*.svn-base"

This should be a better solution than excluding all lines which contain .svn/ since it wouldn't accidentally filter out such lines in a real file.

Answer 3

I think the --exclude option of recursion is what you are searching for.

Answer 4

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/*" 

Answer 5

I tried double grep'in on my huge code base and it took forever so I got this solution with the help of my co-worker

Pruning is much faster as it stops find from processing those directories compared to 'grep -v' which processes everything and only excludes displaying results

find . -name .svn -prune -o -type f -print0 | xargs -0 egrep 'YOUR STRING'

You can also alias this command in your .bashrc as

alias sgrep='find . -name .svn build -prune -o -type f -print0 | xargs -0 egrep '

Now simply use

sgrep 'whatever' 

Answer 6

Another option, albeit one that may not be perceived as an acceptable answer is to clone the repo into git and use git grep.

Rarely, I run into svn repositories that are so massive, it's just impractical to clone via git-svn. In these rare cases, I use a double grep solution, svngrep, but as many answers here indicate, this could be slow on large repositories, and exclude '.svn' occurrences that aren't directories. I would argue that these would be extremely seldom though...

Also regarding slow performance of multiple greps, once you've used something like git, pretty much everything seems slow in svn!

One last thing.., my variation of svngrep passes through colorization, beware, the implementation is ugly! Roughly grep -rn "$what" $where | egrep -v "$ignore" | grep --color "$what"