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I often need to search for a particular string from a directory that has git directory .git/. This is the command I use:

find . -name .git -prune -o -print | xargs grep <string-to-search>

The -name .git -prune -o -print option is to ignore the files under .git/. However, it outputs a lot of 'Is a directory' messages that clutter the whole result. For example,

...
grep: ./reports: Is a directory
grep: ./scripts: Is a directory
grep: ./scripts/js: Is a directory
grep: ./scripts/js/adapter: Is a directory
...

How to modify the command line so that I can ignore the .git/ directory and all other directories (i.e. only search the searchable files).

Apparently, the -type f option doesn't work well in:

find -type f . -name .git -prune -o -print
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    Why aren't you using git-grep? Commented Jan 1, 2013 at 10:03
  • 1
    Also, that last command should be find . -type f -name .git -prune -o -print. Commented Jan 1, 2013 at 10:05
  • Thanks, @Johnsyweb. find . -type f -name .git -prune -o -print actually still outputs directories. Commented Jan 1, 2013 at 10:13
  • 2
    You're right -- it's so much simpler using git-grep: git grep --untracked <string-to-search>. Let me keep this question open; I am still curious how we'd do this using the combination of grep and find. Commented Jan 1, 2013 at 10:24
  • What if you have multiple .git cloned from various places (example using repo), can git-grep (or some other tool) handle this? Commented Mar 21, 2017 at 11:23

4 Answers 4

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27

You don't require find command. You can use grep to search in directory. You can ignore directory by using exclude-dir syntax. 

grep -r --exclude-dir=".git;.svn" "string to search" <directory>
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7 Comments

N.B: This requires GNU Grep (>= 2.5.2).
Any alternative for a grep (BSD grep) 2.5.1-FreeBSD? Thanks!
find . -not -iwholename '.git'
This did not work for me with ; delimited paths. Try a single directory if you have any problems
Upvoted because this works well with multiple .git repositories when using repo. However, I had to split the ; file delimiter like so: grep -R --exclude-dir=".git" --exclude-dir=".svn" MyRegex
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Answering my own question here (without giving any votes, etc.):

Since I was essentially doing a search specifically in a git-tracked directory, git grep is apparently much simpler and more apt tool for the job. Thanks to @Johnsyweb who initially brought this up!

I chose Vivek's answer because it provides a general grep solution as asked in the original question.

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0

Recommend you try ripgrep https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

ripgrep is a line-oriented search tool that recursively searches the current directory for a regex pattern. By default, ripgrep will respect gitignore rules and automatically skip hidden files/directories and binary files.

It's faster and more developer friendly then other tools out there (that I've encountered) including grep and find

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-1

The -type f is misplaced. It is filtering out directories before the -prune, which expects a directory name. The command should be find . -name .git -prune -o -type f -print. If you just want grep to shut up about directories, you can set the environment variable GREP_OPTIONS='--directories=skip'

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