Being an old school geek, I recommend using the "find" command, perhaps piped to "xargs grep", to control which files to grep.
The find command has a more general syntax for logically choosing files, by any property of name, path or stat fields, with possible nested and, or and not predicates, as needed. However ... I learned how to use find, xargs and grep long before grep had any such options as --include and --exclude, so I should probably be ignored as not contributing to the current discussion. Carry on ... <chuckle>. P.S. -- Best use "find -print0" and "xargs -0", in order to avoid some ancient and regrettable nasty irregularities in how xargs otherwise handles embedded spaces and unbalanced quotation marks in the input stream. See my xargs wrapper for a convenient workaround for this nastiness: http://thepythoniccow.us/x.c.txt -- Paul Jackson p...@usa.net
