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I usually do some grep when developing, and there are some extensions that I always don't want to look for (like *.pyc).

Is it possible to create a ~/.egreprc or something like that, and put some filtering to always not show pyc files in result.

Is this possible, or will I have to create an alias for using grep in this manner, and call the alias instead of grep?

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67

There's no rc file for grep, but you can set the environment variable GREP_OPTIONS to a whitespace-separated list of options that will apply to all grep commands. This requires GNU grep (the implementation on non-embedded Linux, Cygwin and some other systems) 2.4; the --exclude option is new to GNU grep 2.5. Put something like this in your ~/.profile:

export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto --exclude=*.pyc --exclude-dir=.git'

If you've done this but want to run grep once without those default options, you can override them (e.g. grep --color=never to force colors off) or empty the GREP_OPTIONS variable by running GREP_OPTIONS= grep ….

Another possibility is to define aliases for grep. I use a variant of the following:

alias regrep='grep -Er --exclude=*~ --exclude=*.pyc --exclude-dir=.bzr --exclude-dir=.git --exclude-dir=.svn'
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    This is THE answer I was looking for. I think I'll read more about ~/.profile. @Gilles, you're the man. Thanks for helping! – Somebody still uses you MS-DOS Feb 25 '11 at 20:26
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    Considering there are two possibilites to do this (GREP_OPTIONS and alias grep): Is one of them preferred? Why or why not? – Christoph Wurm Feb 27 '11 at 19:54
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    @Legate: An important difference is that GREP_OPTIONS will affect grep calls in scripts, while an alias won't. So GREP_OPTIONS should be used sparingly. The most common use is for --color=auto, which is in principle harmless in scripts because it only takes effect if the output is a terminal. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Feb 27 '11 at 20:14
  • GREP_OPTIONS is deprecated; please use an alias or script – Steven Penny Nov 20 '16 at 13:39
3

ack can do what you want and more.

It will ignore binary files by default and you can tell it to ignore other filetypes as you want --notext, --nohtml, etc. It has the ability to define an rc file too so you can customize it with your own types.

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  • I'm using ack too, but I didn't like it. It's indeed fast, but it's not available in all installations, so I was thinking about grep. Thanks! – Somebody still uses you MS-DOS Feb 25 '11 at 19:23
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    ack is a single Perl program, downloadable as a plain text file. If you want, you can go to betterthangrep.com/ack-standalone and cut & paste the contents into a file. I specifically made it so that it is available anywhere you can run Perl. – Andy Lester Feb 26 '11 at 3:52
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Not a direct answer to your question. But grep has an option to ignore all binary files including *.pyc. The option is -I

grep -rI hello .
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0

Not in GNU grep/egrep, there isn't.

You probably want a specially-named alias or script to do this anyway, because someday later you might find yourself very confused when trying to look in something that you forgot matches your special configuration.

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    GREP_OPTIONS in ~/.profile comes close. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Feb 25 '11 at 20:06
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    @Gilles — good point. In fact, I forgot that I have that set myself for --color=auto! – mattdm Feb 25 '11 at 20:14

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