How can I have grep not print out 'No such file or directory' errors?

I'm grepping through a large pile of code managed by git, and whenever I do a grep, I see piles and piles of messages of the form:

> grep pattern * -R -n
whatever/.git/svn: No such file or directory

Is there any way I can make those lines go away?

You can use the -s or --no-messages flag to suppress errors.

-s, --no-messages suppress error messages

grep pattern * -s -R -n

If you are grepping through a git repository, I'd recommend you use git grep. You don't need to pass in -R or the path.

git grep pattern

That will show all matches from your current directory down.

Errors like that are usually sent to the "standard error" stream, which you can pipe to a file or just make disappear on most commands:

grep pattern * -R -n 2>/dev/null

I have seen that happening several times, with broken links (symlinks that point to files that do not exist), grep tries to search on the target file, which does not exist (hence the correct and accurate error message).

I normally don't bother while doing sysadmin tasks over the console, but from within scripts I do look for text files with "find", and then grep each one:

find /etc -type f -exec grep -nHi -e "widehat" {} \;

Instead of:

grep -nRHi -e "widehat" /etc