Re: Useful tip about !aliases

[Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org>]

On Jul 15, 2008, at 5:50 PM, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Kevin Ballard wrote:
>
>> Here's something I discovered recently about !aliases that other  
>> folks might
>> find useful. The canonical form for a shell alias is something like
>>
>> git config alias.foo '!echo bar'
>>
>> where any args given to foo, as in `git foo blah` are passed along  
>> to the
>> shell, so in this case `echo bar blah` would be invoked.
>>
>> Something that I find very useful is the ability to interpolate  
>> arguments into
>> the middle of a command. This doesn't seem possible at first  
>> glance, not
>> without a helper script. But it certainly is possible, with the  
>> help of shell
>> functions:
>>
>> git config alias.reverse '!foo () { args=''; while [[ -n "$*" ]];  
>> do args="$1
>> $args"; shift; done; echo $args; }; foo'
>
> On the gitwiki, you will find a more elegant solution using "sh -c".

I'd forgotten you can do that, but I disagree that it's more elegant.  
It's a bit shorter, certainly, but it also invokes another process.  
Using a shell function doesn't.

-Kevin Ballard

-- 
Kevin Ballard
http://kevin.sb.org
kevin@sb.org
http://www.tildesoft.com