How can I have grep not print out No such file or directory errors

Question

I m grepping through a large pile of code managed by git  and whenever I do a grep  I see piles and piles of messages of the form     gt  grep pattern   -R -n whatever  git svn  No such file or directory   Is there any way I can make those lines go away

User · Answer

I have seen that happening several times, with broken links (symlinks that point to files that do not exist), grep tries to search on the target file, which does not exist (hence the correct and accurate error message).

I normally don't bother while doing sysadmin tasks over the console, but from within scripts I do look for text files with "find", and then grep each one:

find /etc -type f -exec grep -nHi -e "widehat" {} \;

Instead of:

grep -nRHi -e "widehat" /etc

User · Answer

You can use the -s or --no-messages flag to suppress errors      -s  --no-messages         suppress error messages   grep pattern   -s -R -n

User · Answer

I was getting lots of these errors running  quot M-x rgrep quot  from Emacs on Windows with  Git usr bin in my PATH  Apparently in that case  M-x rgrep uses  quot NUL quot   the Windows null device  rather than  quot  dev null quot   I fixed the issue by adding this to  emacs     Prevent issues with the Windows null device  NUL     when using cygwin find with rgrep   defadvice grep-compute-defaults  around grep-compute-defaults-advice-null-device     quot Use cygwin s  dev null as the null-device  quot     let   null-device  quot  dev null quot        ad-do-it    ad-activate  grep-compute-defaults

User · Answer

Use -I in grep   Example  grep SEARCH ME -Irs   logs

User · Answer

I redirect stderr to stdout and then use grep s invert-match  -v  to exclude the warning error string that I want to hide   grep -r  lt pattern gt    2 gt  amp 1   grep -v  No such file or directory

User · Answer

If you are grepping through a git repository  I d recommend you use git grep  You don t need to pass in -R or the path   git grep pattern   That will show all matches from your current directory down

User · Answer

Errors like that are usually sent to the  standard error  stream  which you can pipe to a file or just make disappear on most commands   grep pattern   -R -n 2 gt  dev null

User · Answer

Have you tried the -0 option in xargs  Something like this   ls -r1   xargs -0 grep  some text

User · Answer

I usually don t let grep do the recursion itself  There are usually a few directories you want to skip   git   svn      You can do clever aliases with stances like that one   find      -name  svn -o -name  git    -prune -o -type f -exec grep -Hn pattern         It may seem overkill at first glance  but when you need to filter out some patterns it is quite handy

[grep] How can I have grep not print out 'No such file or directory' errors?

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