Question

I’ve been using the following command to grep for a string in all the python source files in and below my current directory:

find . -name '*.py' -exec grep -nHr <string> {} \;

I’d like to simplify things so that I can just type something like

findpy <string>

And get the exact same result. Aliases don’t seem sufficient since they only do a string expansion, and the argument I need to specify is not the last argument. It sounds like functions are suitable for the task, so I have several questions:

• How do I write it?
• Where do I put it?

Answer 1

If you don’t want to create an entire script for this, you can do it with just a shell function:

findpy() { find . -name '*.py' -exec grep -nHr "$1" {} \; ; }

…but then you may have to define it in both ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile, so it gets defined for both login and interactive shells (see the INVOCATION section of bash’s man page).