bash function alias to recursively grep current directory

[drinkingcoffee]

Hi -

This should be a simple thing to accomplish, but I can seem to figure it out.
Essentially, I want to have a bash alias or function that will let me recursively grep the current directory.

A while back I added this to my .bashrc:

alias rg="grep -r --exclude=\*/.svn/\* --exclude=\*.swp"

This works fine, (and also ignores any svn and vim swp files), and I can call it like:

rg foo *

However, 99.999% of the time, I am only interested in searching in the current directory, so the "*" is a bit redundant. Also, I would say 5-10% of the time, I am typing faster than thinking and forget the "*", so grep just sits there trying to read from stdin.

It's a pretty minor thing, but ideally I'd like to be able to just type:

rg foo

I've tried creating a function to handle this:

function rg(){
grep -r --exclude=\*/.svn/\* --exclude=\*.swp $1 *
}

but it behaves exactly the same as the alias above. escaping the "*" with \'s doesn't work, and neither does trying `pwd` (or even a hard-coded path) in its place.

My bash skills are pretty rudimentary, so I assume that I'm missing something basic here.
Thanks!

[DBelton]

try enclosing your exclude string in single quotes.

[drinkingcoffee]

I think I just figured out the problem.
I guess that a bash 'alias' definition will take precedence over a function defined later on (this makes sense in retrospect).

What I was doing was: editing .bashrc, commenting out the alias rg="..." line, then adding a function of the same name.

Then, sourcing the new .bashrc was still leaving the "rg" alias active, so would not actually call the new function.

Doing

unalias rg

fixes things. fun!