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up vote 6 down vote favorite

On AIX (but this happens on HP-UX as well), I have GNU ls in my path and it is also aliased as ls.

But when i use xargs, it uses the standard Unix ls instead of the alias.

For example (flocate is a function which finds the exact path of the search subject):

flocate mirrorvg | xargs ls -lh
ls: illegal option -- h
usage: ls [-1ACFHLNRSabcdefgiklmnopqrstuxEUX] [File...]

ls -lh /usr/sbin/mirrorvg
-r-xr-x--- 1 root system 37K apr  3  2014 /usr/sbin/mirrorvg*

Why doesn't xargs use the ls alias?

share|improve this question
    
What exactly does "I have GNU ls in my path" mean? Is the directory containing the GNU ls executable in your $PATH environment variable, and does it precede the directory (probably /bin) containing the non-GNU ls command? Please update your question to show us the actual value of your $PATH. xargs will execute the first ls command that it finds in a directory in your $PATH; it doesn't know about aliases. –  Keith Thompson yesterday

2 Answers 2

up vote 5 down vote accepted

The command xargs is only able to run commands, not aliases. GNU parallel, however, is able to run functions:

The command must be an executable, a script, a composed
command, or a function. If it is a function you need to export
-f the function first. An alias will, however, not work (see
why http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=484296).

So I would recommend either:

  • Giving xargs the full path to the version of ls you want to use (or an unambiguous name, perhaps gls depending on how it was installed on your system) or, if your shell allows it,

  • Defining ls as a function (function ls { gls "$@"; }; export -f ls in bash) and using GNU parallel instead of xargs (parallel -j1 if you would like to use a single CPU).

share|improve this answer
    
exporting functions only works with the bash shell. You can use xargs with exported functions as well: ls() { gls "$@"; }; export -f ls; ... | xargs bash -c '"$0" "$@"' ls –  Stéphane Chazelas yesterday
    
Oh, nice trick, it could be useful if one is forced to use xargs. –  dhag yesterday
up vote 3 down vote

The alias substitution is done by the shell. If the shell tries to call command foo, and there is an alias foo=bar, it's the shell that substitutes the foo by bar here.

The shell only does this for commands. (Otherwise, arguments that happen to be the same as an aliased command would be replaced too.) But your ls here is not run by the shell, but an argument to xargs. Therefore, the shell does not replace it.

Then xargs executes ls, but it does not know about the aliases, so it just runs the first one it finds in the path.

The aliases are internal to the shell and there is no standardized way for a program to read them out.

share|improve this answer
1  
Note that doing alias xargs='xargs ' will tell the shell to expand aliases after xargs. –  Stéphane Chazelas yesterday

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