How do you exclude symlinks in a grep?

I want to grep -R a directory but exclude symlinks how dow I do it?

Maybe something like grep -R --no-symlinks or something?

Thank you.

Gnu grep v2.11-8 and on if invoked with -r excludes symlinks not specified on the command line and includes them when invoked with -R.

If you already know the name(s) of the symlinks you want to exclude:

grep -r --exclude-dir=LINK1 --exclude-dir=LINK2 PATTERN .

If the name(s) of the symlinks vary, maybe exclude symlinks with a find command first, and then grep the files that this outputs:

find . -type f -a -exec grep -H PATTERN '{}' \;

The '-H' to grep adds the filename to the output (which is the default if grep is searching recursively, but is not here, where grep is being handed individual file names.)

I commonly want to modify grep to exclude source control directories. That is most efficiently done by the initial find command:

find . -name .git -prune -o -type f -a -exec grep -H PATTERN '{}' \;

For now.. here is how I would exclude symbolic links when using grep

---

If you want just file names matching your search:

for f in $(grep -Rl 'search' *); do if [ ! -h "$f" ]; then echo "$f"; fi; done;

Explaination:

• grep -R # recursive
• grep -l # file names only
• if [ ! -h "file" ] # bash if not a symbolic link

---

If you want the matched content output, how about a double grep:

srch="whatever"; for f in $(grep -Rl "$srch" *); do if [ ! -h "$f" ]; then
  echo -e "\n## $f";
  grep -n "$srch" "$f";
fi; done;

Explaination:

• echo -e # enable interpretation of backslash escapes
• grep -n # adds line numbers to output

---

.. It's not perfect of course. But it could get the job done!

If you're using an older grep that does not have the -r behavior described in Aryeh Leib Taurog's answer, you can use a combination of find, xargs and grep:

find . -type f | xargs grep "text-to-search-for"

If you are using BSD grep (Mac) the following works similar to '-r' option of Gnu grep.

grep -OR <PATTERN> <PATH> 2> /dev/null

From man page

> -O If -R is specified, follow symbolic links only if they were explicitly listed on the command line.