How to create an alias that takes an argument in KornShell

Question

I am trying to create an alias which when given some argument will look for the folder with contains the argument as pattern. Let the alias name be gohf.

Now, I will be using this alias like gohf <some-pattern>, for eg. gohf testing. Now this should look for a folder that contains “testing” in its name and take me to that folder in the last step.

Following is what I could think of.

alias gohf='cd `find . -type d | grep testing`';

The above alias works when the pattern is always “testing”. How can I modify so that if the alias is used as say gohf game, then the alias should take me to the folder that contains game in its name.

Note:

Shell: ksh

I am assuming that there is only one folder for each pattern I input.

Answer 1

As manatwork said in the comment you should use a function instead to handle arguments better.

gohf(){
  cd $(find . -type d -iname "$1" | sed 1q)
}

There is no need to pipe the results of find to grep as using the flag -name or -iname does the same thing. Then we pipe the whole thing to sed so that we only cd to the first "hit" if there are multiple.

In the case that you want to be able to handle multiple find "hits" you should do something like this:

gohf(){
  select dir in $(find . -name "$1" -type d)
  do
    cd $dir
    break
  done
}