grep with --include and --exclude

Question

I want to search for a string foo within the app directory, but excluding any file which contains migrations in the file name. I expected this grep command to work

grep -Ir --include "*.py" --exclude "*migrations*" foo app/

The above command seems to ignore the --exclude filter. As an alternative, I can do

grep -Ir --include "*.py" foo app/ | grep -v migrations

This works, but this loses highlighting of foo in the results. I can also bring find into the mix and keep my highlighting.

find app/ -name "*.py" -print0 | xargs -0 grep --exclude "*migrations*" foo

I'm just wondering if I'm missing something about the combination of command line parameters to grep or if they simply don't work together.

Michael Mior · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-08 01:34:53Z

I was looking for a term on a .py file, but didn't want migration files to be scanned, so what I found (for grep 2.10) was the following (I hope this helps):

grep -nR --include="*.py" --exclude-dir=migrations whatever_you_are_looking_for .

nullrevolution · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-08 19:02:07Z

man grep says:

 --include=GLOB Search only files whose base name matches GLOB (using wildcard matching as described under --exclude).

because it says "only" there, i'm guessing that your --include statment is overriding your --exclude statement.

That's what I assumed as well as stated in my question. I'm just curious if there's a way to use those two options together.

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