It’s always annoying when you do a search (ctrl+h) in Eclipse and it produces results from directories you do not care about.

In my particular case, the project’s ant build expands the built war files into a directory named target. Since this directory duplicates the files in the regular WebContent directory, often times I end up editing the WRONG file from the search results. I will be spending minutes trying to figure out why weren’t my changes taken place once they are redeployed to tomcat.

So I was finally annoyed enough to do some research on how I can stop Eclipse from searching in directories I do not care about.

1. Go to the navigator view of your workspace.
2. Right click on the directory you do not wish Eclipse to search. Click on Properties.
   
3. Select attribute Derived.
   

That should be all you need. Do another search to verify that the files in that directory no longer show up.