How can I exclude directories from grep -R?

‘--exclude-dir=dir’
    Exclude directories matching the pattern dir from recursive directory searches. 

Recent versions of GNU Grep (>= 2.5.2) provide: ‘--exclude-dir=dir’ Exclude directories matching the pattern dir from recursive directory searches. So you can do: grep -R --exclude-dir=node_modules 'some pattern' /path/to/search

# grep -Ri --exclude-dir "/var/www/directory_to_exclude" "search pattern" /var/www
Or multiple directories:# grep -Ri --exclude-dir "/var/www/directory_to_exclude" --exclude-dir "/var/www/another_directory_to_exclude" "search pattern" /var/www
Or wildcard: 
# grep -Ri --exclude-dir "*.svn" "search pattern" *
Or with only exclude: # grep -Rli --exclude="*\.svn*" "search string" /var/www