grep exclude-dir in current directory or subdirectories

Question

I'm attempting to setup my GREP_OPTIONS to always exclude certain directories (eg target/classes ). I'm specifically trying to get this to work for recursive greps. Using --exclude-dir=target/classes works great when the current directory contains target/classes , but not so when I'm in the parent directory. My current solution requires me to set both --exclude-dir=target/classes and --exclude-dir=*/target/classes . I'm looking for a more direct solution, which I assume will involve a regex. I've tried --exclude-dir=(*/)?target/classes and other permutations, but I can't get it to work.

Yes yes, I'm sure this can be accomplished with other tools (ie find, awk, etc), but I'd really like to keep this confined (if possible) to the GREP_OPTIONS solution.

Answer 1

Here is a working example tested, be careful with syntax and not to typo:

root/dspace# grep -r --exclude-dir={log,assetstore} "creativecommons.org"

Above i grep for text "creativecommons.org" in current directory "dspace" and exclude dirs {log,assetstore}.

Done.