How do I get grep to exclude specific paths?

Question

Note: This is NOT a duplicate. I am dealing with a certain instance where grep's options for excluding paths/directories do not behave in an expected way.

I am trying to use grep to recursively search my root filesystem. I am trying to exclude certain directories like /proc, /sys, and /usr/local. If I use --exclude-dir=${DIR_NAME}, then it will not search in paths below ${DIR_NAME}, but this will also mean that it will refuse to search paths below ${DIR_NAME} if ${DIR_NAME} is at a level below the current working directory. As an example, consider this filesystem tree:

${PWD}/
  data/
    settings/
      sys/
    users/
      developer/
        projects/
          my_os/
            build/
            src/
              apps/
              sys/
            Makefile
  extras/
  sys/
    apps/
    os/

If I want my search to exclude ${PWD}/sys and everything under it, grep -rl --exclude-dir=sys will exclude it, but it will also exclude ${PWD}/data/settings/sys and ${PWD}/users/developer/projects/my_os/src/sys, two directories I want included in my search.

I was originally hoping that --exclude-dir/--exclude would be allow for regular expressions and I've found this comment indicating that they do, but it seems that regular expression syntax doesn't affect the utility's behavior (e.g, "^/(dev|proc)"). I'm fine if those two options don't use regular expressions, but I do not want the exclusion pattern to be applied to singular path components. Is there anyway to get it to work like that?

Answer 1

Simply use this:

grep -r "text" | grep -i -v ^sys/ 

You can add so much "| grep -i -v ^dir/" as you need.