How do I alias BSD grep to search the current directory recursively with the input?

Question

I have the same problem as the author here: How do I write an alias for grep -R?

I would like gr whatever to execute grep -nrI whatever ..

Do I require a function or can I do this with an alias?

Answer 1

I can't think of an elegant way to do this with an alias, but it's pretty easy if you define gr as a function:

$ gr() { grep -nrI $1 .; }