Specify ignore custom file patterns in .ackrc

Question

I have certain CSS files of fileName *-c.css and *-gen.css which I want to ignore from ack-grep searches.

I see that --type-set=TYPENAME=.extension does not accept regex filters like *-c.css, any idea of how to get around this problem ?

Answer 1

I came across ack-grep 2.0 which provides --ignore-file option based on regex pattern as below and it worked after adding it to ~/.ackrc.

--ignore-file=match:-c.js
--ignore-file=match:-gen.js
--ignore-file=match:-c.css
--ignore-file=match:-gen.css

Answer 2

Use a regular expression to filter those files you want to search.

ack -G '(?<!-c)(?<!-gen)\.css$' expression_to_search

It uses the perl flavour. I do a negative look-behind to skip those that contain -c or -gen just before the extension.