Hmmm, that means we've been

JeevesBond — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:06:00 +0000

Hmmm, that means we've been acquanted for quite a while. You used to use Gentoo, if memory serves.

That would have been back in 2005/6 we were talking about such things.

I don't have root access on

Megan — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:59:15 +0000

I don't have root access on this server. Maybe I'll have to bug the sys admins to either install this or upgrade grep.

Abhishek Reddy — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:53:00 +0000

Megan wrote:

"command not found" :(

It's not likely to have been installed by default. Try adding it with your package manager. On Debian or Ubuntu:

$ sudo aptitude install ack-grep
$ ack-grep --help
Usage: ack [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]

Search for PATTERN in each source file in the tree from cwd on down.
...

Megan — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:12:37 +0000

"command not found"

Abhishek Reddy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:05:42 +0000

JeevesBond wrote:

ack seems interesting. (offtopic) are you a Debian man now Abhi?

I have been using Debian mainly since at least early 2007, maybe even 2006 if memory serves.

JeevesBond — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:29:09 +0000

How about:
find . -not -path '*/.svn*' | xargs grep -i "string"

ack seems interesting. (offtopic) are you a Debian man now Abhi?

Abhishek Reddy — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:42:00 +0000

Try ack. Your two searches would look something like this:

ack -ai "string"
ack -ai --ignore-dir=log "string"

By default, it ignores .svn and other common version-control or backup cruft. Also, it defaults to a recursive search (use -n to prevent that).

Btw, on Debian the program is called ack-grep -- may not be the same on your distro.

Megan — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:33:45 +0000

What if I want to exclude more than one directory? Say, .svn and log?

Megan — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:22:30 +0000

This works:

grep -iR "string" * | grep -v ".svn"