gf  [PATH]...  [-e] PATTERN | -f PAT_FILE  [PATH]...
    [ NAME | ^EXCLUDE | GREP_OPT ]...

gf  [-e] PATTERN | -f PAT_FILE
    [ NAME | ^EXCLUDE | GREP_OPT | FILE ]...

Use find to search for files in the current directory or the given PATH's, then grep in found files for a regular expression PATTERN. The set of files to search in can be refined by one or more filename patterns NAME and EXCLUDE. Options to grep also follow the pattern. The first usage form is same as:

find [PATH]... [ ! -path "*EXCLUDE*" | -iname NAME ]... -type f \
  -print0 | xargs -0 grep [ -e PATTERN | -f FILE ] [GREP_OPT]...

If this script is run with a name starting with "e", egrep will be used; likewise for "f" and fgrep, and "p" and grep -P. In addition to grep regular expression syntax, the character escapes \s, \d, \S, and \D, when not inside a bracket expression, are replaced with their character class equivalents [[:space:]], [[:digit:]], etc.

The second usage form relies on no PATH's and at least one existing FILE on the comand line, and can be used in conjunction with xargs or command-line expansion to filter results:

ls | xargs -r  gf  PATTERN  "*.py" ^foo
gf  PATTERN  "*.txt"  `cat filelist`

This also allows xargs to run grep with default options, which are defined in $GREPOPTS in this script if it hasn't been exported.

-h, --help      display this help message and exit
-e  PATTERN     use PATTERN as the pattern
-f  PAT_FILE    read patterns from PAT_FILE

gf  "retrasad[oa]"  -in -C 2  README*
gf  ~/foo/src  '\(import\|from\) popen\d'  "*.py"  ^/.svn/  -l