6 thoughts on “Function of the day: rgrep”

1. I like to throw and -I in there as well which is useful when grepping against directories with binaries in it.

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2. Have you tried ack?

   It’s designed to replace most of grep’s usecases.
   It can search recursively in source code files, skipping directories like .svn.

   You’ll never need to hack grep scripts again

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3. The name rgrep is already used by /usr/bin/rgrep. You can also use an alias, which has a few advantages:
   alias grepr=”grep -rin”

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4. There’s always the perl script rgrep with prunes support… here’s the script copied from here

   #!/usr/bin/perl -w
   #
   # vim:ft=perl:fenc=UTF-8:ts=4:sts=4:sw=4:expandtab:foldmethod=marker:foldlevel=0:
   #
   # $Id$
   #
   # originally by Michael Schwern

   # Like grep -r except…
   # * you can leave off the directory and it will use . instead of waiting like
   # a dumbshit for STDIN
   # * It handles paths with spaces and quotes.
   # * it will not traverse into these directories or files.
   my @Prunes = (qw(.svn CVS blib *~ *.bak _darcs imap_cachedir), ‘#*’);

   my @Args = @ARGV;
   my $Dir;
   if( grep(!/^-/, @Args) <= 1 ) {
   $Dir = ‘.’;
   }
   else {
   $Dir = pop @Args;
   }

   @Args = map { “‘$_’” }
   map { s/’/'”‘”‘/g; $_ } @Args;

   # Escape spaces and quotes
   $Dir =~ s{([ '"])}{\\$1}g;

   my $prunes = join ‘ -o ‘, map { “-name ‘$_’ -prune” } @Prunes;
   exec “find $Dir $prunes -o -type f -print0 | “.
   “xargs -0 grep –color=auto @Args”;

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5. I also recommend ack (see ).

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6. Your post makes me remember of my short helper that I uses all the time:

   
rg()
{
filepat="$1"
pat="$2"
shift 2
grep -Er --include=$filepat $pat ${@:-.}
}
# In Zsh, 'noglob' turns off globing.
# (e.g, "noglob echo *" outputs "*")
alias rg='noglob rg'

   It is lovely to use:

   
% rg *.c ^PyErr Lib/
% rg *.c PyErr_Restore . -C 10 | less
% rg *.[ch] stringlib
% rg *.c ^[a-zA-Z]*_dealloc Modules/ Objects/

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