This post is outdated, you should read "sed quickie, search and replace in files" instead!

When working with svn instead of git, there are a lot more hits when performing a simple

grep -Ri "search for me" .

which, when using svn, returns in lots more hits than wanted. To filter them out, add another grep with the -v flag which inverts the results, i.e. passes along everything that does not match the following pattern. Like this:

grep -Ri "search for me" . | grep -v.svn