alias
Create an alias for a command
alias
allows you to create a shortcut or abbreviation for a longer command.
IMPORTANT: aliases in Murex are not macros and are therefore different than other shells. if the shortcut requires any dynamics such as piping
, command sequencing
, variable evaluations
or scripting
… Prefer the function
builtin.
alias alias=command parameter parameter
!alias command
Because aliases are parsed into an array of parameters, you cannot put the entire alias within quotes. For example:
# bad :(
» alias hw="out Hello, World!"
» hw
exec "out\\ Hello,\\ World!": executable file not found in $PATH
# good :)
» alias hw=out "Hello, World!"
» hw
Hello, World!
Notice how only the command out "Hello, World!"
is quoted in alias
the same way you would have done if you’d run that command “naked” in the command line? This is how alias
expects it’s parameters and where alias
on Murex differs from alias
in POSIX shells.
To materialize those differences, pay attention to the examples below:
# bad : the following statements generate errors,
# prefer function builtin to implent them
» alias myalias=out "Hello, World!" | wc
» alias myalias=out $myvariable | wc
» alias myalias=out ${vmstat} | wc
» alias myalias=out "hello" && out "world"
» alias myalias=out "hello" ; out "world"
» alias myalias="out hello; out world"
In some ways this makes alias
a little less flexible than it might otherwise be. However the design of this is to keep alias
focused on it’s core objective. To implement the above aliasing, you can use function
instead.
Alias names can only include alpha-numeric characters, hyphen and underscore. The following regex is used to validate the alias
’s parameters: ^([-_a-zA-Z0-9]+)=(.*?)$
Like all other definable states in Murex, you can delete an alias with the bang prefix:
» alias hw=out "Hello, World!"
» hw
Hello, World!
» !alias hw
» hw
exec "hw": executable file not found in $PATH
There is an order of precedence for which commands are looked up:
runmode
: this is executed before the rest of the script. It is invoked by the pre-compiler forking process and is required to sit at the top of any scripts.test
and pipe
functions also alter the behavior of the compiler and thus are executed ahead of any scripts.private
. Private’s cannot be global and are scoped only to the module or source that defined them. For example, You cannot call a private function directly from the interactive command line (however you can force an indirect call via fexec
).alias
. All aliases are global.function
. All functions are global.global
, set
or let
. Also environmental variables too, declared via export
.You can override this order of precedence via the fexec
and exec
builtins.
alias
!alias
exec
: Runs an executableexport
: Define an environmental variable and set it’s valuefexec
: Execute a command or function, bypassing the usual order of precedence.function
: Define a function blockg
: Glob pattern matching for file system objects (eg *.txt
)global
: Define a global variable and set it’s valuelet
: Evaluate a mathematical function and assign to variable (deprecated)method
: Define a methods supported data-typesprivate
: Define a private function blockset
: Define a local variable and set it’s valuesource
: Import Murex code from another file of code blockThis document was generated from builtins/core/structs/function_doc.yaml.
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