Aliasing piping operations in bash

Question

I frequently will do something like grep -R foo . at the root of a project. It’s helpful but the results get diluted by the inclusion of binary. temp, and test files that I don’t care about. So I end up affixing 2>&1 | grep -vE “Binary|/tmp/|/test/“, which filters out the stuff I don’t care about. Problem is, its a pain to type each time. Everything including and after the 2>&1 stays the same from query to query. So I want to put it in an alias of sorts that would let me grep -R foo . <thingie>, where thingie is something fairly short. I’ve tried aliases and environment variables but aliases only work if theyre the first word on the line, and environment vars I can expand with ${thingie} but the piping seems to get screwed up in the process. Any ideas on how to make this work?

Answer 1

Yes a function is the way to go. If you have GNU grep

1. use the --exclude-dir option so the recursive search does not even bother with it.
2. use the --binary-files=without-match option to ignore binary files (alias -I).

So:

mygrep() {
    grep -R --exclude-dir=tmp --exclude-dir=test -I "$@" .
}

Then call

mygrep Foo
mygrep -i foo
mygrep -E '(foo|bar)baz'