Adding arguments to an alias with brackets

[frstrich]

Question

What I am trying to achieve is:

alias locate = (rg --files | rg $* )

so that I can type "locate foo" into my terminal and get the results from ripgrep. Basically a replacement for find ./ -name foo since find is overwritten by nu and I prefer nu's use-case.

This does not work, because $* is not a valid variable. Sadly the only preset variable I could find in the docs was $in, which misses the point, since it seems to be only used in piping.

Questions:

Is there any documentation on preset variables other than $in? Is there any preset variable for my specific use-case? The brackets needed for functional piping seem to interfere with further arguments. Is there another way to achieve my goal?

Additional context and details

No response

[fdncred]

1. You can use ^ to indicate you want to use external commands like ^find
2. I'm not sure what $* means in this context so I'm not sure how to help you. Maybe others know and can help further.

[frstrich]

1. You can use `^` to indicate you want to use external commands like `^find`

Thanks

2. I'm not sure what `$*` means in this context so I'm not sure how to help you. Maybe others know and can help further.

$* as in Bash's "all arguments", aka for the command foo 1 2 3 $* is 1 2 3

[fdncred]

We don't have such a thing as $* for aliases. We do have a ...rest argument for custom commands. I'm not sure it would work for you or not. e.g.

def locate [...rest] {
  rg --files | rg $rest
}

Is this what it's supposed to do?

[frstrich]

Writing a function instead of an alias didn't even come to my mind. Thank you, it's precisely what i was looking for.