Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!asuvax!hrc!gtephx!reesd
From: reesd@gtephx.UUCP (David Rees)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Aliases For Aegis Commands
Summary: Be carefull with aliases on Apollo
Keywords: aliases aegis
Message-ID: <44c14aa1.f9df@gtephx.UUCP>
Date: 31 Jul 89 20:40:21 GMT
References: <1632@dover.sps.mot.com>
Organization: AG Communication Systems, Phoenix, Arizona
Lines: 64


In article <1632@dover.sps.mot.com>, turner@dover.sps.mot.com (Robert Turner) writes:
> First I know this is a wimpy question, but what the heck.  I'm
> an old Aegis kind of guy slowing migrating to BSD on SR10+.
> What I'm looking for is a set of aliases for some of the more
> common Aegis commands, e.g. cpf, dlf, dlt, crd, crl, wd, etc.
> My fingers keep typing Aegis commands while my brain is saying
> BSD, BSD, BSD!


First of all you must be carefull when making aliases for aegis to unix or
the other way around. For instance I tried to make an alias for cpf:
%alias cp cpf

This is WRONG! First of all cpf does all its copying in pairs while 
cp copies all the items to the last item.

$cpf F1 F2 F3 F4 
F1 -> F2    (F1 is copied to F2)
F3 -> F4    (F3 is copied to F4)

%cp F1 F2 F3 F4/
F1 F2 F3 -> F4 (They are copied into F4)

And second of all with the Unix shells (Bourne and C) the regular
expressions are expanded by the shell, while in Aegis it seems like
the expressions are expanded by the command. For instance I typed
the following:

%cpf ?*.c ./backup -r    <--- DON'T DO THIS!

While this is right out of the manual I missed a critical detail. The '%'
instead of the '$'. Since the C shell expanded the wildcard first, it sent
cpf a list of the files and then cpf proceeded to replace every other
file (about three weeks worth of work, thank god for backups). 

A rule I follow is, NEVER alias an AEGIS command as a Unix command 
(or the reverse). The two systems are just not that much alike. I would suggest
getting used to cp, rm -r (dlt) etc. 

In addition to the wild carding ect., the options go after instead of before. It would
be much easier for you to learn the Unix commands.


Here is a list of similar commands (I wouldn't alias them.....)
cpf     cp    (Not very similar)
dlf     rm
dlt     rm -r  (Recursive remove)
crd     mkdir
crl     ln -s  (Symbolic link, I think the target and source are switched in these)
wd      pwd

Perhaps you could make an alias that instead of performing the command, echos to you the
correct command to use. i.e.

%alias dlt 'echo Use rm'

                                 -David

BTW, I used the standard that a '$' prompt is an AEGIS shell and that a '%'
is an C (Unix) shell.

BTW2, are you no longer able to access AEGIS commands by giving the path (/com/cpf)
after SR10? I am still on SR9.7.