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Asked: 2010-06-15 13:05:29 +0800 CST

How do I traverse the filesystem looking for a regex match?

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I know this is teeball for veteran sysadmins, but I'm looking to search a directory tree for file contents that match a regex (here, the word "Keyword"). I've gotten that far, but now I'm having trouble ignoring files in a hidden (.svn) file tree.

Here's what I'm working with. You can see that I am fine searching for files that include ".svn" in the name but I can't seem to invert the iname var with a ! as I've see in other docs.

find . -exec grep "Keyword" '{}' \; -iname .svn; -print

The above returns pretty much anything and everything.

linux unix bash unix-shell

2 Answers

  1. How about recursive grep:

    grep -r --exclude "*.svn*" "Keyword" .
    • 1
  2. Best Answer
    find . \( -iname '.svn' -prune \) -o \( -exec grep -q ... \; -print \)
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