Question

I use the homebrew package manager and the z-shell. I’m trying to implement a function to create a list of available packages that would be accessible to the grep function. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

function bsearch() {
 brew search | less >| ~/.brewsearch; grep $1 ~/.brewsearch
}

The problem I’m facing is that I’m not sure of what to put in place of $1. I’d like to be able to run the command as follows:

bsearch foo

but what ends up happening is that the function ends up looking for a file because of the argument $1.

In short, the question seems to be: how do I allow for a string in this function? (I’m new to all this).

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

You don’t need to write a function. Just run brew search foo.

The command also accepts a regular expression between slashes, e.g. brew search /foo/

Check Homebrew’s man page (man brew) for more details.