Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!cbmvax!rutgers!njin!princeton!udel!mmdf
From: kvancamp@ardec.arpa (Ken Van Camp)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re:  aliases and RUN
Message-ID: <5230@louie.udel.EDU>
Date: 7 Nov 88 17:57:20 GMT
Sender: mmdf@udel.EDU
Lines: 28


 >Someone else said that this would make 'delete cp' expand into 'delete copy', 
 >which is wrong.  Well, the solution is to do this expansion of the second word
 >only if the first word is 'RUN'.  'RUN' is magic, there's no way around that.
 >
 >This is a non-issue in the UNIX world, because the designers realized that
 >spawning a process was a magic thing.  You do that by 'cp foo bar &' - an 
 >ampersand at the end of the line.  Then there's no first-word second-word 
 >dichotomy.

Your Unix analogy is not valid.  Just because you can do the equivalent 
of a RUN in Unix without a separate command doesn't mean second-word alias 
expansion is a non-issue.  What about the many other commands in Unix that 
are used to run other commands?  Offhand, I can think of a few ('nohup',
'sh', and 'exec'), but there are several others.

No, I can't agree with your arguments.  Second words should NEVER be 
expanded; that goes against the definition of aliases.  Making RUN a special 
case is a hack; what about people who prefer RUNBACK or whatever else they 
want to use to spawn processes?  

                            --Ken Van Camp 
ARPANET:  kvancamp@ARDEC.ARPA   -or-   kvancamp@AC4.PICA.MIL
BITNET:   (use above through normal gateways, like UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU)
USENET:   uunet!ardec.arpa!kvancamp@UUNET.UU.NET

              To the battle cry they raised their glasses:
                   "RTFM: Ray Tracing For the Masses!"