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I'm having trouble creating an alias so I can run find in "silent mode" (without all the Permission denied messages). my bash skills are pretty bad so I'm not sure how to fix this

here's my alias in ~/.bashrc:

alias find='function _find(){find / -name "$1" 2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied"}'

so if I run source ~/.bashrc and then sudo find "Exercism", I get an output of find: ‘Exercism’: No such file or directory

but running find / -name "Exercism" 2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied" yields the correct result.

I'm not sure I'm passing the argument right, or at all, into the aliased find function.

Kusalananda
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ChumiestBucket
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  • Drop the alias and just put the function into your .bashrc or .bash_aliases. Call _find from the command line. It is not a good idea to always search /. – markgraf Oct 09 '19 at 14:57
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    On a sidenote: when your alias is the same as the command itself, you want to alias somecommand='command somecommand --with-options whatever'. – markgraf Oct 09 '19 at 15:00
  • If you want to drop error message find [...] 2&>/dev/null. That's what i use in general. – Julien B. Oct 09 '19 at 15:18
  • I didn't realize that I was defining my function wrong, and for using this command with sudo, it would need to be in a script anyway. – ChumiestBucket Oct 09 '19 at 18:35

2 Answers2

4

Think of aliases as substituting a word with some other text in shell code before it is interpreted.

With a find alias defined as:

alias find='function _find(){find / -name "$1" 2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied"}'

When you type

find

at the prompt, that gets substituted with:

function _find(){find / -name "$1" 2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied"}

If the shell was zsh, that code would define a _find function whose body is find / -name "$1" 2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied". In other shells including bash, you would get a syntax error either because function f() is not the proper variable declaration syntax or (like in bash or yash) because that {find... would be treated as a simple command and bash and yash happen to be the only shells that don't support simple commands as function body.

Here, you want do define a function, not an alias, and since that function would have a different API from the find command's, you'd want to call it my another name like:

myfind() {
  find / -name "$@" 2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied"
}

In any case, whether that's an alias or a function, as both are internal features of the shell, you won't be able to use them from sudo. For sudo to be able to call it, you'd have to make it a real command like a script:

#! /bin/sh -
find / -name "$@" 2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied"

You'd need make that script executable and store it in a directory that is in sudo's secure_path if defined.

Stéphane Chazelas
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alias find='function _find() { find / -name "$1" 2>&1 | grep -v ": Permission denied$"; } ; _find'

Your alias defines a function. You want it do define a function and call it.

AlexP
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