How do I let silver searcher ignore certain sub-directories?

Question

How do I let silver searcher ignore certian sub-directories, in my case I want ag to search md format only and ignore all the node_modules directories, I tried what here silver searcher ignore multiple directories said, but it did not work.

ag --md --ignore-dir={node_modules} foo

I searched the possible solution but found some old issues, e.g, Ignore file in subdirectory not applied properly (opened in 2013) and this New release? opened in 2021

So can this be done ?

Answer 1

There are two answers in the linked Q&A and when I first tried them I did not read the answers carefully, e.g. the highest score one

if it's with just one directory, you'd need to provide a comma, like: ag foo --ignore-dir={dir1,}.

So ag --md --ignore-dir={node_modules,} foo works but ag --md --ignore-dir={node_modules} foo does NOT work. My bad!

Or I can just ag --md --ignore node_modules foo, as here said

--ignore-dir NAME: Alias for --ignore for compatibility with ack.