xargs doesn't recognize bash aliases

command-line xargs bash
Ian Greenleaf Young picture Ian Greenleaf Young · Feb 4, 2009 · Viewed 15.3k times · Source

I'm trying to run the following command:

find . -iname '.#*' -print0 | xargs -0 -L 1 foobar

where "foobar" is an alias or function defined in my .bashrc file (in my case, it's a function that takes one parameter). Apparently xargs doesn't recognize these as things it can run. Is there a clever way to remedy this?

Answer

ephemient picture ephemient · Feb 4, 2009

Since only your interactive shell knows about aliases, why not just run the alias without forking out through xargs?

find . -iname '.#*' -print0 | while read -r -d '' i; do foobar "$i"; done

If you're sure that your filenames don't have newlines in them (ick, why would they?), you can simplify this to

find . -iname '.#*' -print | while read -r i; do foobar "$i"; done

or even just find -iname '.#*' | ..., since the default directory is . and the default action is -print.

One more alternative:

 IFS=$'\n'; for i in `find -iname '.#*'`; do foobar "$i"; done

telling Bash that words are only split on newlines (default: IFS=$' \t\n'). You should be careful with this, though; some scripts don't cope well with a changed $IFS.

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