It’s super annoying when you’re looking for a string in your code, so you do a recursive grep, only to get a ton of matches within svn’s “.svn” directories.

Here’s a solution:

Inside your ~/.bash_profile, insert this line:

alias rgrep="find . -follow ( -name ".svn" ) -prune -o -print | xargs grep -Hn"

Save it, then log out and back in.

Now instead of grep -ir "sprintf" *, do rgrep sprintf. Cake!