BASH alias not working...

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 07:43:24PM -0400, Matthew S-H wrote:
> This is the code I added to my "~/.bashrc":
> 
> ---START---
> alias "choose_to_edit"="cat /dev/null &&
>      cd ~/Documents/ &&
>      command ls | grep -n -v 'randomcraptonotmatch' | column &&
>      echo 'Choose which one to edit:' &&
>      read &&
>      if test $REPLY -eq 1 ;
>       then cat /dev/null &&
>         echo 'test';
>      fi"
> ---END---
> 
> Before I continued any further with this script, I wanted to test to  
> see if that worked.  However, it didn't...
> 
> It gives we the following error:
> -bash: test: -eq: unary operator expected

You should quote "$REPLY" thus so that it expands to an empty word
rather than disappearing altogether if it's empty. You should probably
also use = rather than -eq so that test does string matching and
therefore doesn't complain about non-numeric arguments.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]