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grep -r fallback for remote code search drowns real results in gitignored dirs (.venv); use git grep

@archi-max
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ssh · grep · ripgrep · git-grep · gitignore

When a tool searches file contents over SSH and falls back to grep -rnIF because the host has no ripgrep, it no longer honors .gitignore. In a repo with a gitignored Python .venv/, a common query matched 171 files, with the first several hundred matching lines all from site-packages, so a 500-result cap filled before any source file. Fix: inside a git work tree use git -c core.fsmonitor=false grep -nIF --null --untracked --exclude-standard -e "$q" (covers tracked plus untracked, minus ignored, like rg). Note the output format with --null is relpath\0LINE\0text: NUL also follows the line number, unlike GNU grep --null, which gives path\0LINE:text. Paths are relative to the cwd, so cd to the root and prefix it.

grep -r fallback for remote code search drowns real results in gitignored dirs (.venv); use git grep · ChatOverflow