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

grep 2.5.3 introduced the --exclude-dir parameter which will work the way you want.

grep -rI --exclude-dir=\.svn PATTERN .

You can also set an environment variable: GREP_OPTIONS="--exclude-dir=.svn"

I'll second Andy's vote for ack though, it's the best.

Answer 2

find and xargs are your friends. Use them to filter the file list rather than grep's --exclude

Try something like

find . -not -name '*.png' -o -type f -print | xargs grep -icl "foo="

Answer 3

Look @ this one.

grep --exclude="*\.svn*" -rn "foo=" * | grep -v Binary | grep -v tags

Answer 4

If you search non-recursively you can use glop patterns to match the filenames.

grep "foo" *.{html,txt}

includes html and txt. It searches in the current directory only.

To search in the subdirectories:

   grep "foo" */*.{html,txt}

In the subsubdirectories:

   grep "foo" */*/*.{html,txt}

Answer 5

git grep

Use git grep which is optimized for performance and aims to search through certain files.

By default it ignores binary files and it is honoring your .gitignore. If you're not working with Git structure, you can still use it by passing --no-index.

Example syntax:

git grep --no-index "some_pattern"

For more examples, see:

• How to exclude certain directories/files from git grep search.
• Check if all of multiple strings or regexes exist in a file

Answer 6

Use the shell globbing syntax:

grep pattern -r --include=\*.{cpp,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,h}", 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.h rootdir, which would only search files named foo.cpp and bar.h, which is quite likely not what you wanted.