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From: bfox@AUREL.CALTECH.EDU (Brian Fox)
Newsgroups: gnu.bash.bug
Subject: Defining alias
Message-ID: <8907141318.AA07051@aurel.caltech.edu>
Date: 14 Jul 89 13:18:27 GMT
References: <8907141107.AA19130@amalthea.prosys.se>
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Reply-To: bfox@aurel.caltech.edu
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   Date: Fri, 14 Jul 89 13:07:19 +0200
   From: thomas@prosys.ai.mit.edu (Thomas Thyberg)

   Bash version 1.02
   SUN 3/60 SUNOS3.5
   gcc version 1.35

   Hi.

   There is something I really would like to be able to do in bash and that is
   to write my alias definitions in my .bashrc something like this:

   1:
   alias \
     'pd=		pushd' \
     'ud=		popd' \
     'back=	cd $OLDPWD' \
     etc...
   or
   2:
   alias \
     'pd		=pushd' \
     'ud		=popd' \
     'back		=cd $OLDPWD' \
     etc...

   to make it more readable (I think it gets more readably anyway).

Gee, you might want to do something like this:

    function alias () {
      local name=$1
      shift
      local value="$*"

      if [ "$name" = "" ]; then
	builtin alias
      elif [ "$value" = "" ]; then
	builtin alias $name
      else
	builtin alias $1="$value"
    }

Now you can type:

alias ls	ls -F
alias -		cd ~-

Brian