How to Exclude Directories from grep command in linux?

Question

I Am trying to exclude directories from grep matches, i have tried with --exclude-dir=PATTERN method. But its not working.

ls | grep -E "^Acct" --exclude-dir=Acct

File Structure

Acct/ ---> directory needs to be excluded from grep
AcctReq/ ---> directory needs to be excluded from grep
AcctAdd.txt
AcctInq.txt     
AcctMod.txt       
AcctTrnInq.txt
CardInq.txt
CardHold.txt
Cardacq.txt

In Above files I am using ls | grep -E "^Acct" ls | grep -E "^Acct" command to get only the files starting with Acct , But it is considering the directories as well.

Output:

Acct/
AcctReq/
AcctAdd.txt
AcctInq.txt     
AcctMod.txt       
AcctTrnInq.txt

Expected Output:

AcctAdd.txt
AcctInq.txt     
AcctMod.txt       
AcctTrnInq.txt

Answer 1

--exclude-dir is used to skip directories when running a recursive grep. It's meaningless when you're piping input to grep , since there are no directories or filenames to skip.

If you want to exclude matches from the data being piped to grep use -v .

ls | grep -v 'Acct.*/'