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The quiet option ( -q ), causes grep to run silently and not generate any output. Instead, it runs the command and returns an exit status based on success or failure. The return status is 0 for success and nonzero for failure.
Exclude Directories and Files To exclude a directory from the search, use the --exclude-dir option. The path to the excluded directory is relative to the search directory. To exclude multiple directories, enclose the excluded directories in curly brackets and separate them with commas with no spaces.
-v : This prints out all the lines that do not matches the pattern -e exp : Specifies expression with this option. Can use multiple times. -f file : Takes patterns from file, one per line.
To include all subdirectories in a search, add the -r operator to the grep command. This command prints the matches for all files in the current directory, subdirectories, and the exact path with the filename. In the example below, we also added the -w operator to show whole words, but the output form is the same.
You can use the -s or --no-messages flag to suppress errors.
-s, --no-messages suppress error messages
grep pattern * -s -R -n
If you are grepping through a git repository, I'd recommend you use git grep. You don't need to pass in -R or the path.
git grep pattern
That will show all matches from your current directory down.
Errors like that are usually sent to the "standard error" stream, which you can pipe to a file or just make disappear on most commands:
grep pattern * -R -n 2>/dev/null
I have seen that happening several times, with broken links (symlinks that point to files that do not exist), grep tries to search on the target file, which does not exist (hence the correct and accurate error message).
I normally don't bother while doing sysadmin tasks over the console, but from within scripts I do look for text files with "find", and then grep each one:
find /etc -type f -exec grep -nHi -e "widehat" {} \;
Instead of:
grep -nRHi -e "widehat" /etc
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