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Setting up an alias for a particular version of a command z/OS UNIX System Services User's Guide SA23-2279-00 |
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If you tend to use a command with the same options every time,
you may want to set up an alias for the command with those particular
options. Let's take an example. The grep command
searches through files and prints out lines that contain a requested
string. For example:
displays
all the lines of file that contain the string hello.
Normally, grep distinguishes between uppercase
and lowercase letters; this means, for example, that the search in
the previous example does not display lines that contain HELLO, Hello,
and so forth. If you want grep to ignore
the case of letters as it searches, you must specify the –i option,
as in:
This
finds hello, HELLO, Hello,
and so on.If you think you prefer to use the –i version
of grep most of the time, you can define
the alias:
From this point
on, if you use the command:
it
is automatically converted to:
and
you get the case-insensitive version of the command grep.As
another example, the rm command to delete
(remove) a file has an –i option that prompts
you to confirm the deletion. The file name and a question mark are
displayed. For example, if you entered rm -i file1 and file1 is
in your working directory, you would see the prompt:
before
the system actually removes the file. You then enter y (yes)
or n (no) in response. If you like this extra bit
of safety, you might define:
After
this, when you call rm, it automatically
checks with you before deleting a file, just to make sure that you
really want to delete it.It may seem odd to define an alias that has the same name as a command that is used in the alias, but this is so common that the z/OS® shell checks specifically for an alias of the same name, and does the correct thing. If you find yourself using the same option every time you call a command, you might consider creating an appropriate alias so that the shell automatically adds the option. Of course, the best place to define this alias is in your .profile file; then the alias is set up every time you invoke the shell. |
Copyright IBM Corporation 1990, 2014
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