The latest release, grep-2.5.3, introduced the long awaited option- FTW.

    --exclude-dir=PATTERN
    directories that match PATTERN will be skipped.

This will be a nice solution to exclude .svn directories from the grep matches too

find . -type f \! -path '*.svn/*' -exec grep -H <pattern> {} \;

Cheerz,
Rick

Actually, for scripts, shell functions and aliases, I find the find|xargs solution much cleaner.

For interactive command line usage, I'd use

grep -r --exclude .svn test .

You don't have a regular file named .svn, do you?

To handle newlines correctly, use the action -print0 of find, like this:

find . -type d -name .svn -prune -o type f -print0 | xargs -0r grep -H foo

I believe find/xargs is the general and we should not try to emulate that withing grep --recursive.

grep -r should be used for the most common cases only.

Have a nice day,
      Stepan

I'm sorry, but I don't want to accept this.

Let me give a bit longer explanation:

Traditionally, recursive search was performed as:

find . -type f|grep pattern

The advantage of this approach is the unlimited versatility of this pipe; you can use all of the predicates of ``find'' to construct any condition you need.

For example, you can use

find . -type f -name '*.c' | grep pattern

or

find . -type f '!' -name '*.c' | grep pattern

To include or exclude files.

In particular, you can use

find . -type d -name .svn -prune -false -o -type f | grep pattern

to skip all directories named ``.svn''.
I admit this sounds complicated at first if you have never studied Prolog, but you can get into it. And then the possibilities are unlimited.

From this traditional point of view, the --recursive option of grep was always questioned. I know at least one hacker who deliberately ignores this option and uses find.

A short illustration of this position: does

grep --include='*.c' --exclude='core*'

search file core.c or not? If you use find, you never ask this question.

OTOH, the popularity of the ``rgrep'' tool has proved that there is market for quick recursive search; I guess this was why the -r option was introduced into grep.

The next natural step was introducing --exclude and --include. --exclude-dir would be the next natural step, I agree.

But I don't want to go long that path. We have to draw a line somewhere. And I decided to draw the line now and reject your patch. Sorry.

But I think that the ``simple recursive search'' should be as intuitive as possible.  Ithink that one naturally tries --exclude=.svn first: and I propose that it should exclude directories too. I created bug #11017 to remember me.

On the contrary, --include doesn't apply to directory names, so --include='*.c' searches the whole subtree for C files.

I hope you won't mind too much.

Regards,
    Stepan Kasal