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

Try this one:

 $ find . -name "*.txt" -type f -print | xargs file | grep "foo=" | cut -d: -f1

Founded here: http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/42573-search-files-excluding-binary-files.html

Answer 2

I'm a dilettante, granted, but here's how my ~/.bash_profile looks:

export GREP_OPTIONS="-orl --exclude-dir=.svn --exclude-dir=.cache --color=auto" GREP_COLOR='1;32'

Note that to exclude two directories, I had to use --exclude-dir twice.

Answer 3

In the directories are also many binary files. I can't search only certain directories (the directory structure is a big mess). Is there's a better way of grepping only in certain files?

ripgrep

This is one of the quickest tools designed to recursively search your current directory. It is written in Rust, built on top of Rust's regex engine for maximum efficiency. Check the detailed analysis here.

So you can just run:

rg "some_pattern"

It respect your .gitignore and automatically skip hidden files/directories and binary files.

You can still customize include or exclude files and directories using -g/--glob. Globbing rules match .gitignore globs. Check man rg for help.

For more examples, see: How to exclude some files not matching certain extensions with grep?

On macOS, you can install via brew install ripgrep.

Answer 4

Please take a look at ack, which is designed for exactly these situations. Your example of

grep -ircl --exclude=*.{png,jpg} "foo=" *

is done with ack as

ack -icl "foo="

because ack never looks in binary files by default, and -r is on by default. And if you want only CPP and H files, then just do

ack -icl --cpp "foo="