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From: ins_adjb@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Daniel Jay Barrett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: AShell alias bug
Keywords: ARP 1.3
Message-ID: <1552@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU>
Date: 24 Apr 89 16:41:26 GMT
Organization: The Johns Hopkins University - HCF
Lines: 48


	I have found a small bug with AShell aliases.  Consider the
following command:

		info | sort case

This does a case-sensitive sort of the info command.  Now make it an alias
(the asterisk is the escape character):

		alias is info *| sort case

This works as expected when you type "is".  HOWEVER, now try:

		is | more

You get an error message from sort saying "Can't open case|".  Note
that the command "info | sort case | more" DOES work, but this 
(supposedly) equivalent alias does not.
	The solution:  add a space character to the end of the line when
defining the alias:

		alias is info *| sort case<spacechar>

	This phenomenon does NOT occur when the second command (sort,
in this case) does not have an argument.  For example:

		alias is info *| sort
		is | more

works fine.

	Another problem (maybe not solvable) is that the commands:

		info | sort
		info |sort

both work, but the command:

		info|sort

does not.  Yes, I realize someone might actually invent a file called
"info|sort", but it would be nice if AShell would know that I want a pipe 
here!
-- 
# Dan Barrett	barrett@cs.jhu.edu	(128.220.13.4)	ARPANET             #
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# Dept. of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD  21218 #