List all files

Git directories often contain a lot of auto-created files. For example files created by tests.

If you want to use grep on all files which get tracked by git, you can use this:

git ls-files | grep -vP 'exclude1|exclude2' | xargs -r -d'\n' grep -nP '...'

In detail:

• git ls-files list all files which are tracked in git.
• grep -vP 'exclude1|exclude2' (optional): exclude some lines from the stream of file names.
• xargs -r -d'\n' for every line in stdin stream do ...
• grep -nP '...' search in the file for a pattern. The -n displays the line number. This is handy if you start the command from the terminal of your IDE, then you can click on the output (like myfile.go:42) to jump to the matching line in your IDE.

You can give ls-files a glob expression. This matches the whole filename (including the parent directories).