[Feature request] Grep style directory exclusion

[bag-man]

I've been using bfs for a while now, it is excellent. One thing that find is terrible for is excluding directories, and I thought maybe bfs could add on a more use friendly system.

It would be a lot nicer if there was the option to exclude/include directories/files in the same way that grep does:

--exclude-dir={build,vendor,.git,node_modules} --include=*.{css,vcl,conf,yml,jade,js,styl,php,config,html} --exclude={*.min.js,tags,json}

I'd be quite interested in helping to write this functionality, but I thought I would raise it as an issue first to see what your thoughts on it are.

[tavianator]

So the find analogues of those are:

# --include=*.css
-name '*.css'

# --exclude=*.min.js
! -name '*.min.js'

# --exclude-dir=.git
! -name .git -o -prune -false

I think the first two are fine, but the last one is totally unreasonable. I think the right approach would be:

-exclude .git

which would prune anything named .git without printing it. -nohidden would be equivalent to -exclude '.?*'.

Another thing that's nicer with the grep syntax you give is giving multiple patterns:

# --include=*.{css,vcl,...}
-name '*.css' -o -name '*.vcl' -o ...

Much more compact with the brace-expansion. FNM_EXTMATCH would let you do this at least:

-name '+(*.css|*.vcl|...)'

[tavianator]

Actually -name .git -exclude would be a bit more powerful and consistent with -prune. Basically it would do what people expect -prune to do.

[tavianator]

Oh damn, -name .git -exclude can't work. If -name .git returns false then the predicate short-circuits and -exclude won't even run.

[tavianator]

@bag-man The https://github.com/tavianator/bfs/tree/exclude branch implements this syntax:

bfs -exclude -name .git

What do you think?

[bag-man]

@tavianator Nice one, although I noticed that this worked:

bfs -exclude -name node_modules -name package.json

But this didn't:

bfs -name package.json -exclude -name node_modules

Which is a little confusing.

[merwok]

Throwing another idea here: I’ve recently started using ag (the silver searcher), a grep replacement that looks for a .gitignore file for patterns to ignore. There is also a command-line option to add ignores.

ag replaces a bunch of grep aliases that I was using to look for things in codebases; I don’t have to think about excluding __pycache__ or node_modules or build/dist directories.
It would be amazing to have bfs be a similar better replacement for good old inflexible find.