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?
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
.
Using Bash you may also specify the number of args being passed to your alias (or function) like so:
alias myFuncOrAlias='echo' # alias defined in your ~/.bashrc, ~/.profile, ...
echo arg1 arg2 | xargs -n 1 bash -cil 'myFuncOrAlias "$1"' arg0
echo arg1 arg2 | xargs bash -cil 'myFuncOrAlias "$@"' arg0
This doesn't work because xargs
expects to be able to exec
the program given as its parameter.
Since foobar
in your case is just a bash
alias or function there's no program to execute.
Although it involves starting bash
for each file returned by find
, you could write a small shell script thus:
#!/bin/bash
. $(HOME)/.bashrc
func $*
and then pass the name of that script as the parameter to xargs
I usually use find like this:
find . -iname '' -exec cmd '{}' \;
'{}' will get replaced with the filename, and \; is necessary to terminate the execution chain. However, if that doesn't work with your function, you might need to run it through bash:
find .. |sed -e "s/.*/cmd '&'/"|bash
Find prints each file on a line, sed just prefixes this with your command, and then pipe it to bash for execution. Skip the |bash first to see what will happen.
try
find . -iname '.#*' -print0 | xargs -0 -L 1 $(foobar)