How to create a bash function with variable parameters/arguments to grep several keywords/tags

Question

I'm using the :!grep "tag1" filename | grep "tag2" filename | grep -n "tag3 or more" filename command in vim to search for my code snippets based on their tags (a simple comment at the top of a snippet) in one big file, similar to firefox's tag functionality. I use snippets to remember tricky things.

This is painful to write out each time. I'd like to make an alias, or function to do something like this:

:!greptag tag1 tag2 ... tag39

And it should search the current doc and return the lines with all the tags on them.

Vim is set to interactive shell mode so that it can parse my bashrc for aliases/functions.

set shellcmdflag=-ic "lets vim use bashrc

How can I construct a function that allows for variable arguments like this in bash?

Janito Vaqueiro Ferreira Filho · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-04 21:41:13Z

2

You could also use sed:

sed e '/tag1/!d;/tag2/!d;.../tagN/!d' filename

The /tag1/! command is an address prefix to tell sed to only execute the command if the line contains tag1. The command we execute is "d", to delete the line.

A function (in .bashrc) would then be:

greptags () {
    local filename="$1"
    shift
    sed "$filename" -e "$(echo "$@" | sed -e 's,\([^ ]*\) *,/\1/\!d;,g')"
}

Notice that we use another sed command to parse the arguments into the final sed command list. Basically, for every word (no spaces), we remove the spaces that follows it and put it into the /tagN/!d; command form.

And call it:

greptags filename tag1 tag2 tag3 tag4

Hope this helps =)

edited Oct 4, 2012 at 21:41

answered Oct 4, 2012 at 21:10

Janito Vaqueiro Ferreira Filho

5,0922 gold badges23 silver badges30 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

4 Comments

Michael Krelin - hacker Over a year ago

The problem is that the original code looks for all tags, not any.

CornSmith Over a year ago

Calling this as $greptags tagname filename from terminal (int the directory with the sample .txt file) prints out sed: -e expression #1, char 20: invalid reference \1 on `s' command's RHS

Janito Vaqueiro Ferreira Filho Over a year ago

Sorry... There were a couple of missing things. Fixed it =)

CornSmith Over a year ago

This is great! Thank you! I love sed.

Michael Krelin - hacker · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-04 20:34:22Z

2

How about something like this:

greptags() {
 if [[ -z "$1" ]] ; then
  cat
 else
  local t="$1" ; shift
  greptags "$@" | grep "$t"
 fi
}
greptag() {
 local f="$1" ; shift
 local t="$2" ; shift
 grep "$t" "$f" | greptags "$@"
}

(untested and, probably not exactly what you want, but illustrating the idea).

answered Oct 4, 2012 at 20:34

Michael Krelin - hacker

144k25 gold badges200 silver badges177 bronze badges

3 Comments

CornSmith Over a year ago

It didn't throw any errors, but it's also not working as far as I can tell. I tried with :!greptags "example_tag" filename and without the filename and no luck. It doesn't look like I'll be able to avoid learning bash ;p for my reference, which part of your functions allows for multiple args?

Gilles Quénot Over a year ago

vim don't "see" the bash functions, put the code in a script.

CornSmith Over a year ago

Actually the other answer worked fine from vim (the bottom 3 lines in my question explains why) after I pasted it into my bashrc, unless I'm missing something and this is formatted specifically to be in a script file.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

How to create a bash function with variable parameters/arguments to grep several keywords/tags

2 Answers 2

4 Comments

3 Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

4 Comments

3 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related