Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!leah!wfh58
From: wfh58@leah.Albany.Edu (William F. Hammond)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Alias and Command Separators
Summary: (1) Use "$(command)" for a subshell in the ARP shell or
	 (2) Use ARexx to put commands together
Message-ID: <2306@leah.Albany.Edu>
Date: 16 Dec 89 17:08:20 GMT
References: <7728@cognos.UUCP>
Organization: Dept of Math & Stat, SUNYA, Albany, NY
Lines: 44

In article <7728@cognos.UUCP>, stewartw@cognos.UUCP (Stewart Winter) writes:
> 
> Does anyone out there know how to make the ALIAS command of NEWCLI
***
First, a technical point: the native CLI (opened by "newcli" or the CLI
icon in the WorkBench "System" drawer) does not support command aliasing.
***
> support a sequence of commands.  For example on UNIX, I could
> 
>   alias  abc 'cd Games: ; run hisGame'
> 
> I realize that the ';' denotes a comment to the NEWCLI.  Is there
> a separator that can be used?  I couldn't find anything in the docs.

> Stewart Winter                Cognos Incorporated   S-mail: P.O. Box 9707
> VOICE: (613) 738-1338 x3830   FAX: (613) 738-0002    3755 Riverside Drive
> UUCP: uunet!cognos!stewartw                               Ottawa, Ontario
***
There are a number of command shells for the Amiga that have a good bit
of the functionality of, say, "csh" in UNIX.

Since the ARP shell is freeware, I will respond to the question for
that environment by giving two examples of working alia (aliases?).
The first invokes subshells in which "avail" and "date" are run:
(1)  alias ta  echo "     \$(avail total)     \$(date)"
Here '\' is the ARP escape character (an environmental variable that must be
"set").  If this is done directly from the command line these escapes should
be omitted.  Note that although aliasing itself is not recursive, aliases
could be used inside the subshell parentheses.
(2)  set ac "address command"
     alias esc  echo "\x3b" noline
     alias ais  rx '$ac "info"\$(esc)$ac "status full"\$(esc)$ac "avail total"'
In this example ARexx(tm) (not freely distributable -- but inexpensively priced
and widely reported to be part of WorkBench 1.4) is used to assemble three
command lines under a single alias.  The environmental variable "ac" is used
to save typing.  The alias "esc" functions in subshells to insert semi-colons
in such a way that they will not be interpreted as comment introducers by the
command line.  Thus, we have a three line ARexx script wired as a one line
alias.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
William F. Hammond                   Dept. of Mathematics & Statistics
518-442-4625                         SUNYA, Albany, NY 12222
wfh58@leah.albany.edu                wfh58@albnyvms.bitnet
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