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I am searching a dir for a particular string (to see all instances of where the string is present and in which files). However, I want to exclude one particular file from being searched.

Here's what is happening-

$echo "searchstring" > ./old_folder/useless_file $echo "searchstring" > ./new_folder/good_file $grep -r --exclude="old_folder/useless_file" searchstring * ./old_folder/useless_file:searchstring ./new_folder/good_file:searchstring

Here is the output I want-

./new_folder/good_file:searchstring
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    If you change --exclude="old_folder/useless_file" to simply --exclude=useless_file do you get the same problem? (My reading of the man page suggests the pattern to --exclude should be the basename only, not including the path.) Commented Mar 30, 2016 at 15:51

1 Answer 1

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The --exclude option takes globs that are matched against file names, not directories or full paths:

 --exclude=GLOB Skip files whose base name matches GLOB (using wildcard matching). A file-name glob can use *, ?, and [...] as wildcards, and \ to quote a wildcard or backslash character literally.

So, you could do:

$ grep -r --exclude="*useless_file*" searchstring new_folder/good_file:searchstring

Or, to exclude all files in that directory:

$ grep -r --exclude-dir="old_folder" searchstring new_folder/good_file:searchstring
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