3 ms·

What's a reasonable grep alias I should add to my .bashrc?

• opan 6y ago
  I have `gi` aliased to `grep -i`.
• ben509 6y ago
  The only flag I'd say I want 99% of the time is -E (same as calling egrep) because extended regular expressions are what you almost always want. A sibling comment suggested -i, other useful flags are -w (find whole words) and -C (change the amount of context around matches), but I don't think I always use those. A handy function for searching a tree: greptree() { find "$1" -name "$2" -type f -exec egrep "$3" '{}' + } greptree . '*.java' 'foo[123]' That would search all java files in the current tree. One thing people often don't know is that -exec ... {} + in modern 'find' works like piping to xargs. All that said... when I'm searching a tree, I can usually use 'git grep'.
  • Scarbutt 6y ago
    Grep can search recursively: grep -Er 'foo[123]' --include='*.java' .
  • wahern 6y ago
    -exec {} + is better than piping to xargs as it handles filenames with whitespace properly. Otherwise you have to use -print0 and xargs -0 extensions.
• blibble 6y ago
  grep -P to use pcre (i.e. what everyone knows)
• xorcist 6y ago
  grep -r --exclude-dir=.git --exclude-dir=.svn --color=auto