Question

I can’t retrieve the way to define a shell alias (in bash) like this one :

alias suppr='/usr/bin/find . -name "*~"  | xargs rm -f'

but with “*~” as a parameter of the alias.
I would like to use it like : suppr “.bak” or suppr “*.svn” etc…

(it’s just a dummy example here)

Answer 1

Use a function:

suppr() {
  /usr/bin/find . -name "$@" | xargs rm -f 
}

In general, functions are more flexible and safer to use than aliases. In fact, many people argue that functions should always be used instead of aliases.