CONTAINS(1)

🌸 CONTAINS 💅 (the fish-shell one, bestie)

okay so real talk — this little icon lives in the fish-shell world and she is SO underrated. let me put you on 🫶

---

✨ NAME ✨

contains — test if a word is present in a list. that's it. that's the whole job. and she ate 💅

---

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

contains [OPTIONS] [--] KEY [VALUES ...]

---

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

so basically contains checks whether the set VALUES contains the string KEY. simple as that, no cap.

• if it does contain it → contains exits with code 0 🔥
• if it doesn't → it exits with code 1 💀

she's just a vibe check for your lists, fr fr.

the following options are available:

• -i, --index — prints the index (that's the number of the element in the set) of the first matching element. very "which one of u did this" energy 👑
• -h, --help — displays help about using this command. the classic, the icon, the moment.

⚠️ important ordering tea 🍵 — options must be passed before KEY. every argument after KEY gets considered a value, regardless of whether it starts with a - or not — including -- itself. wild, i know. so if KEY itself starts with a -, use a -- argument to separate it from the options. don't skip this step bestie, it WILL trip you up 😭

see the examples below, they're literally right there ⬇️

---

🌈 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

(i don't make the rules, cat lists are just evil like that 🙈)

this code will add some directories to PATH (envvar) if they aren't yet included:

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

no duplicates, no chaos, only organization. main character energy ✨

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 as an option to itself. instead it treats it as a normal string to check. so polite of it 🎀

contains -i foo -q -- foo

this returns 3, since all arguments after the key are considered a value. yes girl, position three, we counted 💅

---

👑 Copyright 👑

fish-shell developers 💖

---

so yeah, that's the whole page bestie 🌸 go forth and check your lists — no cap, you got this. and just so you know, this was the CONTAINS(1) page from fish-shell version 4.9, dated Sep 08, 2026 — love that for us 🦋✨🍓