Today I learned about 2 flags that can be passed to grep when searching files for text from the command line: --include and --exclude. They are useful for focusing on certain file types when doing a wide ranging search.

For example, say you wanted to search a directory of JavaScript files for some text, but didn’t want to see any results from any test files.

Assuming you use the naming convention testname.spec.js…

grep -rn --exclude=\*.spec.js "text I want to find" ./src

--include uses the same syntax.