Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!ide!hartman
From: hartman@ide.com (Robert Hartman)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: aliases vs. shell functions (was Hard links vs. Soft links)
Keywords: alias, /bin/sh, shell function
Message-ID: <1990Aug29.163357.9849@ide.com>
Date: 29 Aug 90 16:33:57 GMT
References: <1084.26d2a42b@desire.wright.edu> <13646@ulysses.att.com> <2866@wyse.wyse.com> <738@primerd.PRIME.COM> <2123@wn1.sci.kun.nl>
Sender: bert@ide.com (Bert Beaton)
Organization: IDE, San Francisco
Lines: 30

In article <2123@wn1.sci.kun.nl> hansm@cs.kun.nl (Hans Mulder) writes:
>...
>The Korn shell supports both aliases and shell functions; you can say either:
>
>alias ls="/bin/ls -CBb"
>
>or:
>
>ls()
>{
>  /bin/ls -CFb "$@"		# Note the ""
>}
>
>and the effect is pretty much the same.
>...

One further point.  A Korn shell alias does not handle command-line
arguments.  The Korn equivalent to a C-shell alias such as:

alias svi  'sccs edit -s \!*; vi \!*; sccs delget -s \!*'

would be:

svi() { # edit SCCS files
    sccs edit -s "$@"
    vi "$@"
    sccs delget -s "$@"
}

-r