xargs doesn't recognize bash aliases
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