How can I get `find` to ignore .svn directories?

why not just

find . -not -iwholename '*.svn*'

The -not predicate negates everything that has .svn anywhere in the path.

So in your case it would be

find -not -iwholename '*.svn*' -name 'messages.*' -exec grep -Iw uint {} + \;

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As follows:

find . -path '*/.svn*' -prune -o -print

Or, alternatively based on a directory and not a path prefix:

find . -name .svn -a -type d -prune -o -print

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For searching, can I suggest you look at ack ? It's a source-code aware find, and as such will automatically ignore many file types, including source code repository info such as the above.

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To ignore .svn, .git and other hidden directories (starting with a dot), try:

find . -type f -not -path '*/\.*'

However, if the purpose of using find is searching within the files, you may try to use these commands:

git grep - specially designed command for searching patterns within the Git repository.

ripgrep - which by default ignores hidden files and files specified in .gitignore.

Related: How do I find all files containing specific text on Linux?

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Here is what I would do in your case:

find . -path .svn -prune -o -name messages.* -exec grep -Iw uint {} +

Emacs' rgrep built-in command ignores .svn directory, and many more files you're probably not interested in when performing a find | grep. Here is what it uses by default:

find . \( -path \*/SCCS -o -path \*/RCS -o -path \*/CVS -o -path \*/MCVS \
          -o -path \*/.svn -o -path \*/.git -o -path \*/.hg -o -path \*/.bzr \
          -o -path \*/_MTN -o -path \*/_darcs -o -path \*/\{arch\} \) \
     -prune -o \
       \( -name .\#\* -o -name \*.o -o -name \*\~ -o -name \*.bin -o -name \*.lbin \
          -o -name \*.so -o -name \*.a -o -name \*.ln -o -name \*.blg \
          -o -name \*.bbl -o -name \*.elc -o -name \*.lof -o -name \*.glo \
          -o -name \*.idx -o -name \*.lot -o -name \*.fmt -o -name \*.tfm \
          -o -name \*.class -o -name \*.fas -o -name \*.lib -o -name \*.mem \
          -o -name \*.x86f -o -name \*.sparcf -o -name \*.fasl -o -name \*.ufsl \
          -o -name \*.fsl -o -name \*.dxl -o -name \*.pfsl -o -name \*.dfsl \
          -o -name \*.p64fsl -o -name \*.d64fsl -o -name \*.dx64fsl -o -name \*.lo \
          -o -name \*.la -o -name \*.gmo -o -name \*.mo -o -name \*.toc \
          -o -name \*.aux -o -name \*.cp -o -name \*.fn -o -name \*.ky \
          -o -name \*.pg -o -name \*.tp -o -name \*.vr -o -name \*.cps \
          -o -name \*.fns -o -name \*.kys -o -name \*.pgs -o -name \*.tps \
          -o -name \*.vrs -o -name \*.pyc -o -name \*.pyo \) \
     -prune -o \
     -type f \( -name pattern \) -print0 \
     | xargs -0 -e grep -i -nH -e regex

It ignores directories created by most version control systems, as well as generated files for many programming languages. You could create an alias that invokes this command and replace find and grep patterns for your specific problems.

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GNU find

find .  ! -regex ".*[/]\.svn[/]?.*"

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I use grep for this purpose. Put this in your ~/.bashrc

export GREP_OPTIONS="--binary-files=without-match --color=auto --devices=skip --exclude-dir=CVS --exclude-dir=.libs --exclude-dir=.deps --exclude-dir=.svn"

grep automatically uses these options on invocation

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Create a script called ~/bin/svnfind:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Attempts to behave identically to a plain `find' command while ignoring .svn/
# directories.

OPTIONS=()
PATHS=()
EXPR=()

while [[ $1 =~ ^-[HLP]+ ]]; do
    OPTIONS+=("$1")
    shift
done

while [[ $# -gt 0 ]] && ! [[ $1 =~ '^[-(),!]' ]]; do
    PATHS+=("$1")
    shift
done

# If user's expression contains no action then we'll add the normally-implied
# `-print'.
ACTION=-print

while [[ $# -gt 0 ]]; do
    case "$1" in
       -delete|-exec|-execdir|-fls|-fprint|-fprint0|-fprintf|-ok|-print|-okdir|-print0|-printf|-prune|-quit|-ls)
            ACTION=;;
    esac

    EXPR+=("$1")
    shift
done

if [[ ${#EXPR} -eq 0 ]]; then
    EXPR=(-true)
fi

exec -a "$(basename "$0")" find "${OPTIONS[@]}" "${PATHS[@]}" -name .svn -type d -prune -o '(' "${EXPR[@]}" ')' $ACTION

This script behaves identically to a plain find command but it prunes out .svn directories. Otherwise the behavior is identical.

Example:

# svnfind -name 'messages.*' -exec grep -Iw uint {} +
./messages.cpp:            Log::verbose << "Discarding out of date message: id " << uint(olderMessage.id)
./messages.cpp:    Log::verbose << "Added to send queue: " << *message << ": id " << uint(preparedMessage->id)
./messages.cpp:                Log::error << "Received message with invalid SHA-1 hash: id " << uint(incomingMessage.id)
./messages.cpp:            Log::verbose << "Received " << *message << ": id " << uint(incomingMessage.id)
./messages.cpp:            Log::verbose << "Sent message: id " << uint(preparedMessage->id)
./messages.cpp:        Log::verbose << "Discarding unsent message: id " << uint(preparedMessage->id)
./messages.cpp:        for (uint i = 0; i < 10 && !_stopThreads; ++i) {
./virus/messages.cpp:void VsMessageProcessor::_progress(const string &fileName, uint scanCount)
./virus/messages.cpp:ProgressMessage::ProgressMessage(const string &fileName, uint scanCount)
./virus/messages.h:    void _progress(const std::string &fileName, uint scanCount);
./virus/messages.h:    ProgressMessage(const std::string &fileName, uint scanCount);
./virus/messages.h:    uint        _scanCount;

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find . | grep -v \.svn

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Why dont you pipe your command with grep which is easily understandable:

your find command| grep -v '\.svn'

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Just thought I'd add a simple alternative to Kaleb's and others' posts (which detailed the use of the find -prune option, ack, repofind commands etc.) which is particularly applicable to the usage you have described in the question (and any other similar usages):

For performance, you should always try to use find ... -exec grep ... + (thanks Kenji for pointing this out) or find ... | xargs egrep ... (portable) or find ... -print0 | xargs -0 egrep ... (GNU; works on filenames containing spaces) instead of find ... -exec grep ... \;. The find ... -exec ... + and find | xargs form does not fork egrep for each file, but rather for a bunch of files at a time, resulting in much faster execution. When using the find | xargs form you can also use grep to easily and quickly prune .svn (or any directories or regular expression), i.e. find ... -print0 | grep -v '/\.svn' | xargs -0 egrep ... (useful when you need something quick and can't be bothered to remember how to set up find's -prune logic.) The find | grep | xargs approach is similar to GNU find's -regex option (see ghostdog74's post), but is more portable (will also work on platforms where GNU find is not available.)

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In a source code repository, I generally want to do things only to the text files.

The first line is all files, excluding CVS, SVN, and GIT repository files.

The second line excludes all binary files.

find . -not \( -name .svn -prune -o -name .git -prune -o -name CVS -prune \) -type f -print0 | \
xargs -0 file -n | grep -v binary | cut -d ":" -f1

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I use find with the -not -path options. I have not had good luck with prune.

find .  -name "*.groovy" -not -path "./target/*" -print

will find the groovy files not in the target directory path.

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To resolve this problem, you can simply use this find condition:

find \( -name 'messages.*' ! -path "*/.svn/*" \) -exec grep -Iw uint {} +

You can add more restriction like this:

find \( -name 'messages.*' ! -path "*/.svn/*" ! -path "*/CVS/*" \) -exec grep -Iw uint {} +

You can find more information about this in man page section "Operators": http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?find

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Note that if you do

find . -type f -name 'messages.*'

then -print is implied when the whole expression (-type f -name 'messages.*') is true, because there is no 'action' (like -exec).

While, to stop descending into certain directories, you should use anything that matches those directories and follow it by -prune (which is intended to stop descending into directories); like so:

find . -type d -name '.svn' -prune

This evaluates to True for the .svn directories, and we can use boolean short-circuit by following this by -o (OR), after which what follows after the -o is only checked when the first part is False, hence is not a .svn directory. In other words, the following:

find . -type d -name '.svn' -prune -o -name 'message.*' -exec grep -Iw uint {}

will only evalute what is right of the -o, namely -name 'message.*' -exec grep -Iw uint {}, for files NOT inside .svn directories.

Note that because .svn is likely always a directory (and not for example a file), and in this case certainly isn't matching the name 'message.*', you might as well leave out the -type d and do:

find . -name '.svn' -prune -o -name 'message.*' -exec grep -Iw uint {}

Finally, note that if you omit any action (-exec is an action), say like so:

find . -name '.svn' -prune -o -name 'message.*'

then the -print action is implied but will apply to the WHOLE expression, including the -name '.svn' -prune -o part and thus print all .svn directories as well as the 'message.*' files, which is probably not what you want. Therefore you always should use an 'action' in the right-hand side of the boolean expression when using -prune in this way. And when that action is printing you have to explicitly add it, like so:

find . -name '.svn' -prune -o -name 'message.*' -print

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Try findrepo which is a simple wrapper around find/grep and much faster than ack You would use it in this case like:

findrepo uint 'messages.*'

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wcfind is a find wrapper script that I use to automagically remove .svn directories.

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This works for me in the Unix prompt

gfind . \( -not -wholename '*\.svn*' \) -type f -name 'messages.*' -exec grep -Iw uint {} +

The command above will list FILES that are not with .svn and do the grep you mentioned.

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i usually pipe the output through grep one more time removing .svn, in my use it isn't much slower. typical example:

find -name 'messages.*' -exec grep -Iw uint {} + | grep -Ev '.svn|.git|.anythingElseIwannaIgnore'

OR

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 egrep messages. | grep -Ev '.svn|.git|.anythingElseIwannaIgnore'

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