Using grep to search a repository

[Frédéric Perrin]

Le Mardi 11 à 19:36, Mel a écrit :
> On Tuesday 11 November 2008 19:17:28 Aggelidis Nikos wrote:
>> Hi to all the list,
>>
>> i have a project with a lot of bash scripts in a folder hierarchy.I
>> haven't wrote the project myself so many times i have to search for
>> the definition of a function. For this purpose i decided to use grep
>> {recursively}.
>> The problem is that the project is an svn repository... so grep
>> returns results from .svn and it is really messes up the outcome of
>> grep. I tried bypassing the problem using the `--exclude=file_pattern'
>> but since its use is for files not directories it doesn't work.... So
>> the questions are:
>>
>> 1) Can i bypass certain directories{i.e. '.svn' or 'log/'}, using
>> grep? {or a combination of tools + grep}
>
> man find(1), specifically -path and -exec arguments. Example:
>
> find . -type f \( \! -path '*/.svn/*' -a \! -path '*/log/*' \) \
> 	-exec grep foo {} +

FWIW, when doing a similar search, the command built by emacs is (a
longer version of) the following :

find . \( -path \*/.svn -o -path \*/log \) -prune -o -type f \( -name
\*.sh\* \) -exec grep -i -nH -e pattern {} /dev/null \;

Isn't "-path .svn -prune" more efficient than "! -path .svn"? I mean,
with the second one, won't find also descend into .svn folders, only to
find that all files have a path containing .svn?

-- 
Fred