Exclude all hidden directories with grep and pcregrep

Question

I'm trying to exclude all hidden directories from recursive search.

I think .*/\..* this should match hidden directories and this indeed works with find, however grep doesn't think so.

pcregrep -rnI -C 5 --exclude-dir='.*/\..*' '^\s*async def' .

grep -rnIP -C 5 --exclude-dir=*/.* '^\s*def' .

What am I doing wrong here?

Oh, and I know about ripgrep, silver searcher etc. The question is about grep and pcregrep.

Possible duplicate of Exclude hidden subdirectories from grep -r — AJefferiss, Mar 02 '17 at 08:55
@AJefferiss Yeah I've seen this answer. It's not a duplicate. The answer in the linked question is .* which would exclude current directory which starts with . and wouldn't find anything. — user1685095, Mar 02 '17 at 09:03

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 02 '17 at 09:56

4

With pcregrep:

pcregrep -r --exclude-dir='^\..' pattern .

With grep:

grep -r --exclude-dir='.[^.]*' pattern .

Please note that the meaning of --exclude-dir is different for pcregrep and grep. Read the corresponding manuals for details.

answered Mar 02 '17 at 09:56

Satō Katsura

Worth noting that grep -r --exclude-dir='.*' pattern works fine too - that is, using '.*' as exclude pattern and omitting the . argument – don_crissti Mar 02 '17 at 11:57
@don_crissti Oh, I didn't know about ommiting directory, thanks. I've solved it with $(pwd) but this is better – user1685095 Mar 02 '17 at 12:05
1

@user1685095 - no problem, it's really easy to overlook: "if no file operand is given, grep searches the working directory" - keep in mind though that Sato's solution is the proper way to do it and the only way to make it work if you want to use grep -r on a list of directories which includes . (that is the cwd) – don_crissti Mar 02 '17 at 12:06
@don_crissti Also IIRC grep-ing in the current directory when you don't specify a starting point is a GNU extension. – Satō Katsura Mar 02 '17 at 15:25

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