Exclude .svn directories from grep [duplicate]

Answer 1

For grep version 2.5.1 you can add multiple --exclude items to filter out the .svn files.

$ grep -V | grep grep
grep (GNU grep) 2.5.1

GREP_OPTIONS="--exclude=*.svn-base --exclude=entries --exclude=all-wcprops" grep -l -R  whatever ./

Answer 2

If you use ack (a 'better grep') it will handle this automatically (and do a lot of other clever things too!). It's well worth checking out.

Answer 3

grep --exclude-dir=".svn"

works because the name ".svn" is rather unique. But this might fail on a more generalized name.

grep --exclude-dir="work"

is not bulletproof, if you have "/home/user/work" and "/home/user/stuff/work" it will skip both. It is not possible to define "/*/work/*" to restrict the exclusion to only the former folder name. As far as I could experiment, in GNU grep the simple --exclude won't exclude directories.

Answer 4

Two greps will do the trick:

1. The first grep will get everything.

2. The second grep will use output of first grep as input (via piping). By using the -v flag, grep will select the lines which DON'T match the search terms. Voila. You are left with all the ouputs from the first grep which do not contain .svn in the filepath.

   -v, --invert-match Invert the sense of matching, to select non-matching lines.

   grep the_text_you_want_to_search_for * | grep -v .svn
   

Answer 5

For grep >=2.5.1a

You can put this into your environment (e.g. .bashrc)

export GREP_OPTIONS='--exclude-dir=".svn"'

PS: thanks to Adrinan, there are extra quotes in my version:

export GREP_OPTIONS='--exclude-dir=.svn'