BASH alias not working...

[Byron Saltysiak]

Hmm... my first inclination is to break this complex logic into a
shell script. I have a /bin directory in my /home directory which I
put personal scripts in. Just add that directory to your path.

You could put this whole thing into a script called something like
choose_to_edit.sh and make sure that script is executable.

I'd also put all the commands you want to run on separate lines and
check the exit value of the important ones with $? instead of putting
them all on one line with &&.

Making a standalone script and putting the commands on different lines
will make it easier to debug. Also, if you have the script on your
path I know you can tab complete it, not sure about aliases.

On 6/20/05, Matthew S-H <mathbymath at aol.com> 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
> 
> What am I doing wrong?
> 
> Any help would be appreciated.
> 
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-- 
Byron
http://byron.saltysiak.com