Using an alias in find -exec

Question

I have a very long command in bash, which I do not want to type all the time, so I put an alias in my .profile

alias foo='...' 

Now I want to execute this alias using find -exec

find . -exec foo '{}' \; 

but find cannot find foo:

find: foo: No such file or directory

Is it possible to use an alias in find?

Answer 1

find itself doesn't know anything about aliases, but your shell does. If you are using a recent enough version of bash (I think 4.0 added this feature), you can use find . -exec ${BASH_ALIASES[foo]} {} \; to insert the literal content of the alias at that point in the command line.

Answer 2

Nope, find doesn't know anything about your aliases. Aliases are not like environment variables in that they aren't "inherited" by child processes.

You can create a shell script with the same commands, set +x permissions and have it in your path. This will work with find.