Question

I get the following error

find: paths must precede expression: a

I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong

Answer 1

There are a couple issues here. The arguments are in $@, not @. Variable interpolation doesn’t happen in within single quotes, either. I only mention those for educational purposes, though, because the ultimate problem is that you can’t do argument expansion in an alias: it will evaluate it when declaring the alias, not dynamically when you use the alias. You have to make a function to do this. Like so:

function makeprivate() { find "$@" -exec chmod go-rwx {} \; ; }

Edit: added missing semicolon.