Use grep --exclude/--include syntax to not grep through certain files

Use the shell globbing syntax:

grep pattern -r --include=\*.cpp --include=\*.h rootdir

The syntax for --exclude is identical.

Note that the star is escaped with a backslash to prevent it from being expanded by the shell (quoting it, such as --include="*.cpp", would work just as well). Otherwise, if you had any files in the current working directory that matched the pattern, the command line would expand to something like grep pattern -r --include=foo.cpp --include=bar.cpp rootdir, which would only search files named foo.cpp and bar.cpp, which is quite likely not what you wanted.

Update 2021-03-04

I've edited the original answer to remove the use of brace expansion, which is a feature provided by several shells such as Bash and zsh to simplify patterns like this; but note that brace expansion is not POSIX shell-compliant.

The original example was:

grep pattern -r --include=\*.{cpp,h} rootdir

to search through all .cpp and .h files rooted in the directory rootdir.

If you just want to skip binary files, I suggest you look at the -I (upper case i) option. It ignores binary files. I regularly use the following command:

grep -rI --exclude-dir="\.svn" "pattern" *

It searches recursively, ignores binary files, and doesn't look inside Subversion hidden folders, for whatever pattern I want. I have it aliased as "grepsvn" on my box at work.

Please take a look at ack, which is designed for exactly these situations. Your example of

grep -ircl --exclude=*.{png,jpg} "foo=" *

is done with ack as

ack -icl "foo="

because ack never looks in binary files by default, and -r is on by default. And if you want only CPP and H files, then just do

ack -icl --cpp "foo="

grep 2.5.3 introduced the --exclude-dir parameter which will work the way you want.

grep -rI --exclude-dir=\.svn PATTERN .

You can also set an environment variable: GREP_OPTIONS="--exclude-dir=\.svn"

I'll second Andy's vote for ack though, it's the best.

The suggested command:

grep -Ir --exclude="*\.svn*" "pattern" *

is conceptually wrong, because --exclude works on the basename. Put in other words, it will skip only the .svn in the current directory.

I find grepping grep's output to be very helpful sometimes:

grep -rn "foo=" . | grep -v "Binary file"

Though, that doesn't actually stop it from searching the binary files.

find and xargs are your friends. Use them to filter the file list rather than grep's --exclude

Try something like

find . -not -name '*.png' -o -type f -print | xargs grep -icl "foo="

The advantage of getting used to this, is that it is expandable to other use cases, for example to count the lines in all non-png files:

find . -not -name '*.png' -o -type f -print | xargs wc -l

To remove all non-png files:

find . -not -name '*.png' -o -type f -print | xargs rm

etc.

As pointed out in the comments, if some files may have spaces in their names, use -print0 and xargs -0 instead.

Try this one:

 $ find . -name "*.txt" -type f -print | xargs file | grep "foo=" | cut -d: -f1

Founded here: http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/42573-search-files-excluding-binary-files.html

those scripts don't accomplish all the problem...Try this better:

du -ha | grep -i -o "\./.*" | grep -v "\.svn\|another_file\|another_folder" | xargs grep -i -n "$1"

this script is so better, because it uses "real" regular expressions to avoid directories from search. just separate folder or file names with "\|" on the grep -v

enjoy it! found on my linux shell! XD

The --binary-files=without-match option to GNU grep gets it to skip binary files. (Equivalent to the -I switch mentioned elsewhere.)

(This might require a recent version of grep; 2.5.3 has it, at least.)

suitable for tcsh .alias file:

alias gisrc 'grep -I -r -i --exclude="*\.svn*" --include="*\."{mm,m,h,cc,c} \!* *'

Took me a while to figure out that the {mm,m,h,cc,c} portion should NOT be inside quotes. ~Keith