contains - test if a word is present in a list — fish-shell 4.2.1 documentation

# contains - test if a word is present in a list

## Synopsis

    contains [OPTIONS] KEY [VALUES ...]

## Description

`contains` tests whether the set VALUES contains the string KEY. If so, `contains` exits with code 0; if not, it exits with code 1.

The following options are available:

-i or --index

  Print the index (number of the element in the set) of the first matching element.

-h or --help

  Displays help about using this command.

Note that `contains` interprets all arguments starting with a - as an option to `contains`, until an -- argument is reached.

See the examples below.

## Example

If animals is a list of animals, the following will test if animals contains “cat”:

    if contains cat $animals
       echo Your animal list is evil!
    end

This code will add some directories to `PATH` if they aren’t yet included:

    for i in ~/bin /usr/local/bin
        if not contains $i $PATH
            set PATH $PATH $i
        end
    end

While this will check if function `hasargs` is being ran with the -q option:

    function hasargs
        if contains -- -q $argv
            echo '$argv contains a -q option'
        end
    end

The -- here stops `contains` from treating -q to an option to itself. Instead it treats it as a normal string to check.