Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi

I would like to replace one of our script, and add some pre-checking for the input file before running the command, but I bumped into the following issue:

Original command: use < input.txt

I cannot modify the original command, but I created the useit script which would be called as an alias called use, so it would have a priority before the original command. I would like to check the content of the input.txt file, and still keep the original syntax of the command:

so basically it would be: useit < input.txt

The problem is, that in the useit command I cannot call the parameters after the redirection (<). Is it possible to eliminate the meaning of < and handle it as a string after the useit command, so I could refer to the input.txt file as a parameter?

I don't understand. Can you not write a wrapper script. -- do your preprocessing
on the file, then call the other script

Code:

while read record
do
 # do stuff with each record here.
done < somefile.txt > input.txt
otherscript.sh

Can you wrap the original script in quotation marks and then pass that to the new command?

Code:

newcommand "use < input.txt"