I would like to grep all files except some file types?

Question

How do I recursively grep files within a given folders except a couple file types?

For example, I'm looking for a string within my workspace folder but it ends up searching inside sql files and generates serialized strings.

So in this case, I'd like to grep the workspace folder except sql files.

I'm preferably looking for a one-liner if possible.

Answer 1

If you have GNU grep you can use the --exclude=GLOB option, like

grep -r --exclude='*.sql' pattern dir/

Answer 2

This will do that for you and exclude .sql and .txt files:

find /some/dir -type f ! -name '*\.sql' ! -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 grep 'foobar'

However it sounds like ack would be a far better tool for what you're trying to do:

ack -a --nosql 'foobar' /some/dir