Using an alias in find -exec

Question

I have a very long command in bash, which I do not want to type all the time, so I put an alias in my .profile

alias foo=\'...\'

Now I want

Answer 1

Another way of calling an alias when processing the results of find is to use something like this answer

so the following should work:

alias ll="ls -al"
find . -type d | while read folder; do ll $folder; done

Answer 2

find itself doesn't know anything about aliases, but your shell does. If you are using a recent enough version of bash (I think 4.0 added this feature), you can use find . -exec ${BASH_ALIASES[foo]} {} \; to insert the literal content of the alias at that point in the command line.

Answer 3

Nope, find doesn't know anything about your aliases. Aliases are not like environment variables in that they aren't "inherited" by child processes.

You can create a shell script with the same commands, set +x permissions and have it in your path. This will work with find.

Answer 4

You can use the variable instead.

So instead of:

alias foo="echo test"

use:

foo="echo test"

then execute it either by command substitution or eval, for instance:

find . -type f -exec sh -c "eval $foo" \;

or:

find . -type f -exec sh -c "echo `$foo`" \;

Here is real example which is finding all non-binary files:

IS_BINARY='import sys; sys.exit(not b"\x00" in open(sys.argv[1], "rb").read())'
find . -type f -exec bash -c "python -c '$IS_BINARY' {} || echo {}" \;

Answer 5

I ran into the same thing and pretty much implemented skjaidev's solution.

I created a bash script called findVim.sh with the following contents:

[ roach@sepsis:~ ]$ cat findVim.sh                                                                                                        #!/bin/bash                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
find . -iname $1 -exec vim '{}' \;

Then I added the the .bashrc alias as:

[ roach@sepsis:~ ]$ cat ~/.bashrc | grep fvim                                                                                         
alias fvim='sh ~/findVim.sh'

Finally, I reloaded .bashrc with source ~/.bashrc.

Anyways long story short I can edit arbitrary script files slightly faster with: $ fvim foo.groovy

Answer 6

It's not possible (or difficult / error-prone) to use aliases in the find command. An easier way to achieve the desired result is putting the contents of the alias in a shellscript and run that shellscript:

alias foo | sed "s/alias foo='//;s/'$/ \"\$@\"/" > /tmp/foo
find -exec bash /tmp/foo {} \;

The sed command removes the leading alias foo=' and replaces the trailing ' by "$@" which will contain the arguments passed to the script.