Shell Programming and Scripting

Is it possible to make a bash script such that entering a command in all capital letters would be equivalent to using "sudo" before that command?

For example:
"sudo chmod 777 foo.txt" becomes "CHMOD 777 foo.txt"

filenames in UNIX are case-sensitive, so doing this would rule out a lot of valid filenames.

If you only need to do this for specific commands, creating those filenames would be a straightforward way to do it:

Code:

#!/bin/sh

# filename:  /bin/CHMOD
exec sudo chmod "$@"

Or a set of functions:

Code:

function CHMOD
{
        sudo chmod "$@"
}

I don't know a way to make the shell recognize any possible all-uppercase command name just because it's uppercase. Some sort of preprocessor would probably be needed.

Code:

alias CHMOD='sudo chmod'

Yes, it's possible with bash. If bash didn't find a command then it execute special function "command_not_found_handle" if it exists. So you can do something like (bash 4.x):

Code:

 function command_not_found_handle { local cmd=$1; shift; sudo ${cmd,,} "$@"; }

You can use

Code:

local cmd=`echo $1 | tr 'A-Z' 'a-z'`

in an older version of bash. And of course, you may add some validation on "$cmd"