Question

I want to use both bash alias and bash function with several arguments. I emulate svn sub commands.

$ svngrep -nr 'Foo' .
$ svn grep -nr 'Foo' .

My expectation is both act as below:

grep --exclude='*.svn-*' --exclude='entries' -nr 'Foo' .

But actual, only alias (‘svngrep’) does well, function (‘svn grep’) causes invalid option error. How to write my .bashrc?

#~/.bashrc

alias svngrep="grep --exclude='*.svn-*' --exclude='entries'"

svn() {
  if [[ $1 == grep ]]
then
  local remains=$(echo $@ | sed -e 's/grep//')
  command "$svngrep $remains"
else
  command svn "$@"
fi
}

Answer 1

You want shift to remove the first word from the positional parameters: this preserves the array-like nature of "$@".

svn() {
  if [[ $1 = grep ]]; then
    shift
    svngrep "$@"
  else
    command svn "$@"
  fi
}

With bash’s [[ builtin, single = is used for string equality and double == is used for pattern matching — you only need the former in this case.