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up vote 1 down vote favorite

I have dafined the following in .bashrc:

 alias fg='find . -name $1 | xargs grep --color $2'

in order to write 

fg "*.txt" " my_text "

and find all file that have extension .txt and contain " my_text " but it does not work. Why?

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3  
I think that you cannot pass arguments to an alias. Try converting fg to a function instead. – faif Mar 18 '11 at 9:39
1  
I have an alias --> alias ff='find . | xargs grep $1 -sl' which works fine! – Narek Mar 18 '11 at 9:45
7  
fg is a shell builtin, I recommend you chose a different name whether you implement this as an alias or (better still) a function. – Johnsyweb Mar 18 '11 at 9:53
3  
@Narak, I think your second example there is only working by accident. – mattdm♦ Mar 18 '11 at 12:11

4 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

Aliases in bash do not take parameters (as already pointed out), so when you need something like that you can use bash functions (like the one provided by @l0b0).

But what you are trying to achieve here, can be done in a better way by using only grep.

grep -r --color --include="*.txt" " my_text " ./

BTW, fg is a shell built in command, an important one. You should avoid using it as a name for aliases or functions.

EDIT: in a function

$ ffg() { rgrep --color --include="$1" "$2" ./; }
$ ffg "*.txt" " my_text "
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1  
This assumes GNU grep, of course. – Johnsyweb Mar 18 '11 at 10:07
up vote 2 down vote

find ./ -name "$1" -exec grep -l "$2" {} \; should do the trick.

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$i should be $1, and $1 and $2 should be quoted to allow blanks and such in filenames and search-word. – user unknown Mar 26 '11 at 12:07
Whoops, my bad. Fixed. – Shadur Mar 26 '11 at 16:13
up vote 0 down vote

grep doesn't take file names on standard input, it searches through standard input, so you're better off with this:

fg()
{
    find . -name "$1" -exec grep --color $2 -- "{}" \;
}
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This and the former one do not work :(.I get an error message:syntax error near unexpected token `(' – Narek Mar 18 '11 at 9:54
@Narek: Try unalias fg first. Remember to remove it from you .bashrc – forcefsck Mar 18 '11 at 10:02
I have defined this: function fndg() { find . -name "$1" -exec grep --color $2 -- "{}" \; } but this does not work. – Narek Mar 18 '11 at 10:10
up vote 0 down vote accepted

This works!

function fndg()
{
   find . -name "$1" | xargs grep -rn --color "$2"
}
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find can call grep without xargs invocation, see -execdir, but in this case, the called program grep can iterate itself. – user unknown Mar 26 '11 at 12:06
xargs will be more efficient, as it will call grep with several filenames at once, instead of one at a time using -exec – glenn jackman Mar 26 '11 at 23:25
gnu find can handle mutliple filenames at once too: find . -name "$1" -exec grep --color $2 -- {} + if ended with + instead of ";" – user unknown Mar 27 '11 at 19:59

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