Shell Programming and Scripting

I'd like to define an alias to awk's begin statement since I use awk with different delimiters all the time and it is tiresome to type awk '{OFS="\t";FS="\t"}{BLAH BLAH}' every time. The problem is that bash won't let me make an alias with an open quote, which is necessary for the BEGIN alias to work

I've tried:

Code:

alias awktab='\'{OFS="\t";FS="\t"}'

And a number of other combinations, but even if I manage to get the alias defined, awk still won't accept it for some reason.

Any ideas?

An alias should be a complete command, not a part of one. You may have better luck trying this in a shell function.

Maybe I am missing something here but it seems to me that the easiest way to achieve what you want to do is to customise your editor. For example if you use vi, you can easily add a macro to insert a string anywhere you want to. For example

Code:

:map 9 i{OFS="\t";FS="\t"}<control-v><escape><enter>

will insert the string '{OFS="\t";FS="\t"}' anytime the 9 key is pressed.

Thanks for the replies!

I customized emacs like crazy...I'm a big fan of macros, but I do a lot of work on the command line and for that I'd love to have this function/alias defined.

I tried defining this function:

Code:

awktab () { awk '{OFS="\t";FS="\t"}{'$1'}'; }

but it doesn't work if the command you need to execute is longer than one word. For example:

Code:

echo "" | awktab 'print "hello"'

outputs an unexpected newline error. I don't understand what's going on...maybe my understanding of the way bash interprets positional parameters is not quite up to par.