til/unix/ignore-a-directory-during-ripgrep-search.md

Ignore A Directory During ripgrep Search

When searching for patterns in project with many directories and files using ripgrep, it is easy to end up with an overwhelming amount of results. If you know that a certain directory of results isn't of interest, you can exclude that directory. This is done with the glob flag (-g) and the inverse (!) operator.

Here is an example of just using the -g flag. This will find all matches of the pattern within that directory.

$ rg 'some pattern' -g 'dir/'

To instead exclude that directory and by extension search everywhere else, we can invert the glob match with !.

$ rg 'some pattern' -g '!dir/'

This says, find the pattern anywhere that is not in dir/.

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