putting find in a bash_profile function

Question

I want to make bash function in my .bash_profile that basically does a find ./ -name $1, very simple idea, seems not to work. My tries don't print things the right way i.e.:

find_alias() {
     `find ./ -name $1 -print`                                                                                                                                                                           
 }
 alias ff='find_alias $1'

The above if I do something like ff *.xml I get the following one liner:

bash: .pom.xml: Permission denied

The following after that:

find_alias() {
    echo -e `find ./ -name $1 -print`
}
alias ff='find_alias $1'

does find them all, but puts the output of that onto one massive long line, what am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

find_alias() {
  find ./ -name $1 -print
}

You don't need, nor want, the backticks. That would try to execute what the find command returns.

Answer 2

Backticks make shell treat output of what's inside them as command that should be executed. If you tried ´echo "ls"´ then it would first execute echo "ls", take the output which is text ls and then execute it listing all files.

In your case you are executing textual result of find ./ -name *.xml -print which is a list of matched files. Of course it has no sense because matched file names (in most cases) are not commands.

The output you are getting means two things:

• you tried to execute script from pom.xml (like if you typed ./pom.xml) - makes no sense
• you don't have execution rights for that file

So the simple solution for you problem, as @Mat suggested, is to remove backticks and let the output of find be displayed in your terminal.