Use grep --exclude/--include syntax to not grep th

Question

I'm looking for the string foo= in text files in a directory tree. It's on a common Linux machine, I have bash shell:

grep -ircl "foo=" *

In the directories are also many binary files which match "foo=". As these results are not relevant and slow down the search, I want grep to skip searching these files (mostly JPEG and PNG images). How would I do that?

I know there are the --exclude=PATTERN and --include=PATTERN options, but what is the pattern format? The man page of grep says:

--include=PATTERN     Recurse in directories only searching file matching PATTERN.
--exclude=PATTERN     Recurse in directories skip file matching PATTERN.

Searching on grep include, grep include exclude, grep exclude and variants did not find anything relevant

If there's a better way of grepping only in certain files, I'm all for it; moving the offending files is not an option. I can't search only certain directories (the directory structure is a big mess, with everything everywhere). Also, I can't install anything, so I have to do with common tools (like grep or the suggested find).

Answer 1

I found this after a long time, you can add multiple includes and excludes like:

grep "z-index" . --include=*.js --exclude=*js/lib/* --exclude=*.min.js

Answer 2

I find grepping grep's output to be very helpful sometimes:

grep -rn "foo=" . | grep -v "Binary file"

Though, that doesn't actually stop it from searching the binary files.

Answer 3

The --binary-files=without-match option to GNU grep gets it to skip binary files. (Equivalent to the -I switch mentioned elsewhere.)

(This might require a recent version of grep; 2.5.3 has it, at least.)

Answer 4

To ignore all binary results from grep

grep -Ri "pattern" * | awk '{if($1 != "Binary") print $0}'

The awk part will filter out all the Binary file foo matches lines

Answer 5

those scripts don't accomplish all the problem...Try this better:

du -ha | grep -i -o "\./.*" | grep -v "\.svn\|another_file\|another_folder" | xargs grep -i -n "$1"

this script is so better, because it uses "real" regular expressions to avoid directories from search. just separate folder or file names with "\|" on the grep -v

enjoy it! found on my linux shell! XD

Answer 6

Try this:

1. Create a folder named "--F" under currdir ..(or link another folder there renamed to "--F" ie double-minus-F.
2. #> grep -i --exclude-dir="\-\-F" "pattern" *