[There are times when history is not the best way to repeat commands. Here, Jerry gives an example where a few well-chosen aliases can make a sequence of commands, all run on the same file, even easier to execute. -TOR]
While I was writing the articles for this book, I needed to look through a set of files, one by one, and run certain commands on some of those files. I couldn't know which files would need which commands, or in what order. So I typed a few temporary aliases on the C shell command line. (I could have used shell functions ( 10.9 ) on sh -like shells.) Most of these aliases run RCS ( 20.14 ) commands, but they could run any UNIX command (compilers, debuggers, printers, and so on).
%alias h 'set f="\!*";co -p -q "$f" | grep NOTE'
%alias o 'co -l "$f"'
%alias v 'vi "$f"'
%alias i 'ci -m"Fixed title." "$f"'
The
h
alias stores the filename in a
shell variable (
6.8
)
. Then it runs a command on that file. What's nice is that, after I use
h
once, I don't need to type the filename again. Other aliases get the filename from
$f
:
%h ch01_summary
NOTE: Shorten this paragraph: %o
RCS/ch01_summary,v -> ch01_summary revision 1.3 (locked) done %v
"ch01_summary" 23 lines, 1243 characters ...
Typing a new h command stores a new filename.
If you always want to do the same commands on a file, you can store all the commands in one alias:
%alias d 'set f="\!*"; co -l "$f" && vi "$f" && ci "$f"'
%d ch01_summary
The
&&
(two ampersands) (
44.9
)
means that the following command won't run unless the previous command returns a zero ("success") status. If you don't want that, use
;
(semicolon) (
8.5
)
instead of
&&
.
-