Exclude .svn directories from grep

Question

When I grep my Subversion working copy directory, the results include a lot of files from the .svn directories. Is it possible to recursively grep a directory, but exclude all results from .svn directories?

Solution 1

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/*" 

Solution 2

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'

PPS: This env option is marked for deprecation: https://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/html_node/Environment-Variables.html "As this causes problems when writing portable scripts, this feature will be removed in a future release of grep, and grep warns if it is used. Please use an alias or script instead."

Solution 3

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.

Solution 4

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

Solution 5

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.

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Comments

[Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com]

Related How can I exclude directories from grep -R?

[gen_Eric]

On the Windows version of GNU Grep, I had to use --exclude-dir=\.svn

[Noufal Ibrahim]

+1 for ack. I have a shell alias and use it by default.

[osgx]

Only for gnu grep version >=2.5.1a

[osgx]

Only for gnu grep version >=2.5.1a

[coderintherye]

The method you list above using find and xargs does not work, at least on RHEL5 in my environment. I still get .svn-base listings.

[Darragh Enright]

ha. I was just about to upvote but I had already. seems I was here before :)

[Dave]

This should be a comment to the accepted answer, not an answer in itself.

[karatedog]

@Dave: Thanks for the tip. You have just commented on a 2 year old comment.

[Chandranshu]

The second grep removes all color formatting.

[rymo]

--exclude only matches file patterns, like *.java

[jperelli]

+1 for the second example, the first didn't work for me with GNU grep 2.6.3 using export GREP_OPTIONS="--exclude-dir=\".svn\" -nR --color"

[Adrian Gunawan]

You don't need to have double quote - it didnt work for me when the double quote is present

[Andy Lester]

Another problem is that it will remove any lines that happen to have ".svn" in them, whether or not the .svn is because of the filename, or is actually in the file. Another problem is that you're spending the time searching the files in the .svn directory that you know you're going to exclude. Better to --exclude from the beginning.

[José Tomás Tocino]

Really nice that ack. Careful that, in Ubuntu and Linux Mint, the "ack" package has nothing to do with the "ack - better grep", which is located in the "ack-grep" package.

[Shane]

alias grepsvn='grep --exclude-dir=".svn"' grepsvn -R searchstring .

[spaaarky21]

This would also waste time finding matches in .svn only to filter them after the fact.

[user193130]

As @osgx said, exclude-dir doesn't work on my GNU grep 2.5. Instead, the following works well for me as all the accidental matches are within the *.svn-base files: grep --exclude="*.svn-base"

[dwanderson]

Was doing it the latter way, but that lost --color support, which made me sad. --exclude-dir gets me what I need, and color-coded.

[Hi-Angel]

That unfortunately didn't solve problem with all hidden dirs (e.g. I don't want it to descend to .stack-work dir), also I didn't quite like that its output takes more space by having filenames on a separate line. So I end up making an alias to grep alias grepexclhid="grep --exclude-dir=\".*\"".

[Hi-Angel]

An alias to exclude all dot-starting dirs: alias grepexclhid="grep --exclude-dir=\".*\"". One might even want to make the alias name to be grep, then to use it without an alias you'd have to type full path /usr/bin/grep.

[shjeff]

Have you noticed difference, this is --exclude-dir no --exclude-dirs?

[yukashima huksay]

GREP_OPTIONS stopped being a supported environment variable after 2.20