Shell Programming and Scripting

Hey guys,
Hopefully a simple question for you.

In csh I have an alias that looks like:
alias ff 'find . -name \!* -print'
and can therefore perform a search for a file by typing:
ff filename

The same comand does not work in ksh
alias ff="find . -name \!* -print"
I get:
find: 0652-009 There is a missing conjunction

Any ideas what the ksh equivalent is ?

Thanks

timsk

In your csh alias, you are using !*. !* has some significance in csh as the following quote from 'man csh':

So the !* that is sent in to the ff alias feeds the -name option with the required arguments. You need to check how to do this in ksh.

According to my AIX documentation "alias" as a ksh built-in command is working exactly the same way as "/usr/bin/alias" and does string substitution only. That is "alias foo=bar" will replace any occurrence of "foo" to "bar" in your input string (=command) , but will not expand any variables.

I suppose (since you are coming from a csh environment) you do not have AIX (do you?) so I'm only left to guesses what your system may support, but suppose it doesn't do such a thing.

Then the thing you *can* do is: define a function in your .kshrc:

Code:

# cat ~/.kshrc
...
ff ()
{
     find . -name "$1" -print
}
...

This will work the same way as your alias, save for you will have to "unset" it instead of "unalias" it if you want to restore the original behaviour of "ff" (whatever that may be).

Hope this helps.

bakunin

As a function .... that looks good. Yes I am on AIX. Thank you Bukunin

Tim