Grep and ignore minified javascript

Question

Is there a way to tell ack/grep to ignore minified Javascript? Those files have thousands of characters per line and screw up the search output.

Answer 1

ack 1.x does not have a way to ignore minified javascript directly. This will be addressed in ack 2.0. We're working on it at http://github.com/petdance/ack2 .

Answer 2

Try something like this:

grep foo $(find -name '*.js' -exec file {} \; | grep -v "long lines" | sed 's/:.*//')

• find -name '*.js' finds all the .js files in the current directory and subdirectories.

• Adding -exec file {} \; to the find command runs the file command on each result.

• The results of file are piped into grep, and files listed as having "long lines" are removed from the results.

• The descriptions from file are stripped off with sed, leaving only the filenames. These are the files grep will search for "foo."