Aliases and Variables Keep Things Short and Simple

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Juliet Kemp
By Juliet Kemp

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Aliases are great for saving typing time, and you probably already have a handful set up. But you may not be aware that it’s possible to set up aliases that take command line variables as an argument. Read on for
an example.

Note: You can set
up the commands given below either directly from the command line or by
putting them into your shell config file (e.g., ~/.bashrc or
~/.tcshrc) and then sourcing that.

Occasionally, I want to check which desktop belongs to a particular
user. I have a local LDAP directory value set for this, so the command 

ldapsearch "(localUser=username)"

does the trick.
I want to set up an alias for this, with the
command line argument taking the place of username.

In tcsh, this can be done straightforwardly using
!:1 for the first argument, !:2 for the second, and so on.
Remember, you’ll need to escape the ! in the alias definition.

So for my LDAP search:

alias finduser 'ldapsearch "(localUser=!:1)"'

Then the following:

$ finduser username

Unfortunately, in bash/sh/ksh this is no good,
as you can’t put arguments in aliases. What you can do to produce
the same effect is write a function. 

function finduser() { ldapsearch "(localUser=$1)"; }

(Note the ; at the end of the command.)

To pass in further arguments to bash, you use $2, $3 and so on. Or, to pass in all the arguments on the command line, $*. This
gives much more scop for saving your typing fingers!

This article was first published on EnterpriseITPlanet.com.

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