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

Question

I often use the find command to search through source code, delete files, whatever. Annoyingly, because Subversion stores duplicates of each file in its .

Answer 1

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 {} + \;

Answer 2

GNU find

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

Answer 3

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'

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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.*'

Answer 6

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

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

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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?