[linux] How can I exclude directories from grep -R?

I want to traverse all subdirectories, except the "node_modules" directory.

Frequently use this:

grep can be used in conjunction with -r (recursive), i (ignore case) and -o (prints only matching part of lines). To exclude files use --exclude and to exclude directories use --exclude-dir.

Putting it together you end up with something like:

grep -rio --exclude={filenames comma separated} \
--exclude-dir={directory names comma separated} <search term> <location>

Describing it makes it sound far more complicated than it actually is. Easier to illustrate with a simple example.

Example:

Suppose I am searching for current project for all places where I explicitly set the string value debugger during a debugging session, and now wish to review / remove.

I write a script called findDebugger.sh and use grep to find all occurrences. However:

For file exclusions - I wish to ensure that .eslintrc is ignored (this actually has a linting rule about debugger so should be excluded). Likewise, I don't want my own script to be referenced in any results.

For directory exclusions - I wish to exclude node_modules as it contains lots of libraries that do reference debugger and I am not interested in those results. Also I just wish to omit .idea and .git hidden directories because I don't care about those search locations either, and wish to keep the search performant.

So here is the result - I create a script called findDebugger.sh with:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
grep -rio --exclude={.eslintrc,findDebugger.sh} \
--exclude-dir={node_modules,.idea,.git} debugger .

You could try something like grep -R search . | grep -v '^node_modules/.*'

A simpler way would be to filter your results using "grep -v".

grep -i needle -R * | grep -v node_modules

A simple working command:

root/dspace# grep -r --exclude-dir={log,assetstore} "creativecommons.org"

Above I grep for text "creativecommons.org" in current directory "dspace" and exclude dirs {log,assetstore}.

Done.

find . ! -name "node_modules" -type d 

Many correct answers have been given here, but I'm adding this one to emphasize one point which caused some rushed attempts to fail before: exclude-dir takes a pattern, not a path to a directory.

Say your search is:

grep -r myobject

And you notice that your output is cluttered with results from the src/other/objects-folder. This command will not give you the intended result:

grep -r myobject --exclude-dir=src/other/objects-folder

And you may wonder why exclude-dir isn't working! To actually exclude results from the objects-folder, simply do this:

grep -r myobject --exclude-dir=objects-folder

In other words, just use the folder name, not the path. Obvious once you know it.

From the man page:

--exclude-dir=GLOB
Skip any command-line directory with a name suffix that matches the pattern GLOB. When searching recursively, skip any subdirectory whose base name matches GLOB. Ignore any redundant trailing slashes in GLOB.

Recent versions of GNU Grep (>= 2.5.2) provide:

--exclude-dir=dir

which excludes directories matching the pattern dir from recursive directory searches.

So you can do:

grep -R --exclude-dir=node_modules 'some pattern' /path/to/search

For a bit more information regarding syntax and usage see

• The GNU man page for File and Directory Selection
• A related StackOverflow answer Use grep --exclude/--include syntax to not grep through certain files

For older GNU Greps and POSIX Grep, use find as suggested in other answers.

Or just use ack (Edit: or The Silver Searcher) and be done with it!

Very useful, especially for those dealing with Node.js where we want to avoid searching inside "node_modules":

find ./ -not -path "*/node_modules/*" -name "*.js" | xargs grep keyword

If you want to exclude multiple directories:

"r" for recursive, "l" to print only names of files containing matches and "i" to ignore case distinctions :

grep -rli --exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,dir3} keyword /path/to/search

Example : I want to find files that contain the word 'hello'. I want to search in all my linux directories except proc directory, boot directory, sys directory and root directory :

grep -rli --exclude-dir={proc,boot,root,sys} hello /

Note : The example above needs to be root

Note 2 (according to @skplunkerin) : do not add spaces after the commas in {dir1,dir2,dir3}

This one works for me:

grep <stuff> -R --exclude-dir=<your_dir>

This syntax

--exclude-dir={dir1,dir2}

is expanded by the shell (e.g. Bash), not by grep, into this:

--exclude-dir=dir1 --exclude-dir=dir2

Quoting will prevent the shell from expanding it, so this won't work:

--exclude-dir='{dir1,dir2}'    <-- this won't work

The patterns used with --exclude-dir are the same kind of patterns described in the man page for the --exclude option:

--exclude=GLOB
    Skip files whose base name matches GLOB (using wildcard matching).
    A file-name glob can use *, ?, and [...]  as wildcards, and \ to
    quote a wildcard or backslash character literally.

The shell will generally try to expand such a pattern itself, so to avoid this, you should quote it:

--exclude-dir='dir?'

You can use the curly braces and quoted exclude patterns together like this:

--exclude-dir={'dir?','dir??'}

A pattern can span multiple path segments:

--exclude-dir='some*/?lse'

This would exclude a directory like topdir/something/else.

If you are grepping for code in a git repository and node_modules is in your .gitignore, you can use git grep. git grep searches the tracked files in the working tree, ignoring everything from .gitignore

git grep "STUFF"