Re: z/bzImages, shell scripts
Tom Lineman <linelizardtom@hotmail.com> 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 dmaze@mit.edu 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?"
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