Tom Lineman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: TL> My second question has to do with small shell scripts. I was TL> reading a book on Unix the other day, and it talked about TL> "aliases," which it stated only ran under Berkely *nixes. I'm TL> guessing that means FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, or BSDI, but can TL> Debian linux use aliases, too?
Aliases aren't a function of the kernel, but of the shell that's executing commands. To my knowledge, at least ksh, bash, zsh, and tcsh support shell aliases, and I believe traditional csh does as well. This means that these shells will provide aliases on *any* system that runs them; I routinely use aliases under zsh on Debian i386 Linux, Sun, and SGI machines. TL> The reason I'm asking is that I wrote some small shell scripts to TL> make life a little bit easier. For example, let's say I wanted to TL> make a program called "delete" that would act like this: TL> TL> rm -iv (with a goal of being able to say "delete foo" and have it DTRT) Assuming what I quoted is the entire contents of the shell script, it won't do what you want. Whenever you tell the shell "delete" with any parameters, it runs "rm -iv" with no parameters. The equivalent shell script would be #!/bin/sh rm -iv $* (The $* expands to all of the arguments passed on the command line.) You could also do this with aliases: alias delete='rm -iv' Then the shell replaces "delete" on the command line with "rm -iv", so "delete foo" gets replaced with "rm -iv foo", which is what you want. TL> P.S. I know this is probably a silly question, but if my CD-ROM TL> drive is the second device on my first IDE Controller, would it be TL> /dev/hdb ? Yes. You can forget this if you make a symbolic link called /dev/cdrom which points to hdb, and then just use /dev/cdrom when you want your CD-ROM. -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://donut.mit.edu/dmaze/ "Hey, Doug, do you mind if I push the Emergency Booth Self-Destruct Button?" "Oh, sure, Dave, whatever...you _do_ know what that does, right?"
