I have recently discovered ack and ack -ir --ignore-dir={node_modules,dist,.git} <search-term> works great for most things but this
---node_modules/
---------------project1/
-----------------------node_modules/
---------------project2/
-----------------------node_modules/
I would like to search all files under the "root" node_modules and excluding all internal ones.
Note: if I run find . -type f | ack -v 'node_modules|.git|dist' under the root node_modules folder, I get a proper file list. this happen because find . gives out relative paths. Any way to feed this list to ack ?
ack -i <search-term> ./node_modules/*
should do what you want.
If you want to include hidden files and folders too, set shopt -s dotglob (assumes Bash) first.
Background information:
ack has many rules for ignoring files that you don't typically want to be searched built in.
As of at least version 2.14, this includes directories named .git and node_modules, at whatever level of the hierarchy (ack searches recursively by default, though you may add -r / -R / --recursive to make that explicit).
To see the complete list of directories / files that are ignored by default, run ack --dump.
By using globbing (pathname expansion) to let the shell expand pattern ./node_modules/* to a list of actual items inside ./node_modules, the ignore rule for node_modules is bypassed for those explicitly passed items.