Re: Easy, quick, BASH question

[Randall R Schulz <rrschulz at cris dot com>]

Kevin,

In BASH aliases are much more limited than they are in CSH/TCSH. BASH 
aliases can only perform a left-hand substitution for the aliased command. 
It can be a multi-word substitution, but the alias is a completely 
unparameterized substitution and the substitution remains strictly at the 
left of the resulting command with any arguments passed to the alias added 
on the right / after those appearing in the alias definition.

To get anything more complicated, you must use a shell procedure. E.g.:

hcgrep() {
        grep -n "$@" $(find -name '*.[ch]')
}

Note that you want to use "$@" not "$*" since the former yields each 
argument individually quoted whereas the second produces a single argument 
to grep consisting of each argument to chgrep concatenated with a single 
space interpolated between each.

Randall Schulz
Mountain View, CA USA


At 15:04 2002-08-02, Barnhart, Kevin wrote:
> I'm trying to setup an alias for grep that recursively looks through all .c
> and .h files for a string.  So far I've tried variations of:
>
> alias hcgrep='grep -n "$*" $(find . -name '*.[ch]')'
>
> There's probably just one little thing I'm missing...
>
> Thanks,
> Kevin

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