Grepping Through Your Dotfiles

I manage my dotfiles with a bare git repository, as described in this post. One issue I have run into is remembering where exactly I added this or that alias. Did I place it in .bash_aliases, or did I create a separate file, like the file for my Git aliases. And what exactly does it do, anyway? Here are a few tricks I've learned to help with this.

The type built-in

The type command-name command is useful in this regard. If command-name is an alias, it will tell you what it is aliased to. If it is a built-in, it will give you the path to its binary.

$ type gst
gst is aliased to `git stash`

$ type cp
cp is /usr/bin/cp

If it's a function, it'll spit out the whole function for you:

getremote is a function
getremote ()
{
    local remote=$(git config --get remote.origin.url);
    echo $remote;
    if [[ "$remote" =~ ^https:// || -n git@github.com: ]]; then
        remote=${remote/https:\/\/github.com\//git@github.com:};
        remote=${remote/https:\/\/gitlab.com\//git@gitlab.com:};
        remote=${remote/https:\/\/bitbucket.org\//git@bitbucket.org:};
        remote=${remote/git:\/\/github.com\//git@github.com:};
        remote=${remote/git:\/\/gitlab.com\//git@gitlab.com:};
        remote=${remote/git:\/\/bitbucket.org\//git@bitbucket.org:};
        echo "$remote" | xclip -selection clipboard;
        echo "Remote repo copied to clipboard in SSH format";
    else
        echo "Not a Git repo or remote URL not recognized";
    fi
}

Grepping through dotfiles

But the type command doesn't tell you where the alias or function is located. One fantastic solution is git grep. The git grep command is pretty simple: it greps through a git repository. It's often a more user friendly alternative to grep, because you don't need to specify the file(s) that you want to search in. Just run git grep foo from inside a git repo, and you'll receive a lovely list of matches, by filename. Even better, it only searches through files that are being tracked by Git.

This is a perfect fit for grepping through your dotfiles, but a bit of setup is in order. First, recall the alias that allows us to interact with the dotfiles repo:

alias dotgit='git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'

Now, we could just run the command as dotgit grep foo. However, will only work if we're inside a directory that's being tracked by our dotfiles repo. This is often a bit inconvenient. So, we can wrap the command in a simple function:

function dgrep() {
  # cd's home, greps the dotgit repo, and cd's back to cwd
  cd && dotgit grep $1; cd -
}

Now we can run the command dgrep foo from anywhere to grep our dotfiles, without changing our current working directory.