Linux find and grep for files not match pattern

Question

I'm trying to search the entire file system for specific text. This command does that but it gets hung up in certain directories like '/proc':

find / -print0|xargs -0 grep whatever 

What I'd like to do is only send files to grep that don't match '/sys' '/proc' '/tmp' '/lib'.

Update: After the help from Gary below I needed to add a few more excluded directories so I decided to write a python script to do this:

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import os
from os.path import join, getsize
import time
import re

search = "192.168.30"
searchRoot = "/"
reobj = re.compile(r"^/var|^/dev|^/proc|^/sys|^/bin|^/boot|^/home|^/lost|^/media|^/misc|^/mnt|^/net|^/sbin|^/selinux|\.log")

start = time.time()
for root, dirs, files in os.walk(searchRoot):
    for name in files:
        fullPath = os.path.join(root, name)
        if not reobj.search(fullPath):
            try:
                fileSize = os.path.getsize(fullPath)
                if (fileSize < 51200):
                    try:
                        #print fullPath
                        fileobj = open(fullPath, 'r')
                        text = fileobj.read()
                        fileobj.close()
                        index = text.find(search)
                        if (index > -1):
                            print index, ":", fullPath
                            sys.stdout.flush()
                    except:
                        pass
            except:
                pass

print "Completed search for", search, "in", searchRoot, "in",  time.time() - start, "seconds."

Answer 1

GNU grep, which is what you're using if you're running Linux, will do recursive searches by itself, without the need for find and xargs. It also has an --exclude-dir option to "Exclude directories matching the pattern DIR from recursive searches." So you could write your search as

grep -R --exclude-dir=/sys --exclude-dir=/proc --exclude-dir=/tmp --exclude-dir=/lib whatever /

---

Update following comment:

If your grep doesn't support -R or --exclude-dir, then you might have to resort to find and xargs, which work fine, but have messy syntax for this task. I seldom get it right the first time.

find / -path /sys -prune -o \( -path /proc -prune -o \( -path /tmp -prune -o \( -path /lib -prune \) \) \) -o -print0 | xargs -0 grep whatever