Re: FreeCOM feature review: ALIAS

On Mon, 11 Nov 2002, Eric Auer wrote:

> @echo off
> echo Setting up ALIASes. Type ALIAS to view a list!
>
> rem alias go=locate %1 /d+ /g /n
>
> rem does not work, because alias does not process %1 and
> rem locate must have filespec as FIRST argument
> rem so I must keep using GO.EXE which only searches the current drive!

Bad designed program ;-)
Feature is already on to-do list.

> But I wonder if it is possible to auto-load the aliases (not by simply
> call fdalias.bat

No. And is not planned.

> in fdauto.bat / autoexec.bat but by something that even works for NEW
> instances of FreeCOM, for example when I shell out from TED3 (tiny editor:

The following features are on the to-do list:
a) inheritance of Aliases and/or sharing of aliases among all FreeCOM
instances;
b) 4dos like 4START/4END scripts.

> ALIAS just works like "whenever the command starts with FOO, and there
> is an ALIAS FOO=BAR..., pretend that the line would have started with
> BAR...". So you cannot play around with command line arguments or anything.

I cannot follow / understand what's the point here.
I've explicitly dropped aliases of the form:

ALIAS LS /L=DIR
ALIAS LS=DIR /W

and I won't re-enable this for the simple reason that it caused quite
mis-interpretation for most users (e.g. complaining that LS /F/L does not
trigger the LS /L alias), secondly the processing in this way is by far
more easier.

On feature list is such behaviour:

1) ALIAS /B go=locate %%1 /d+ /g /n
2) ALIAS ls=dir/w

Variant 1) will interprete "GO" like a batchfile, but with this single
line as its contents; hence it breaks GO's command line into argument and
creates a new argument context (ergo %1 == 1st argument a.s.o.).
Variant 2) as now.

4DOS has a feature to auto-detect the variant 1) by checking the command
line for argument auto-variables (namely, %1..%9 and associates). It's
nifty, but may fail in certain circumstances.

Also, because you have either-or, there is the need to substitute a
number of arguments as once, e.g. here:

ALIAS /B GO=locate %%1 /d+ %%2 /g /n %%3&

So that: %1/%2 as usual and %3& is substituted by all arguments %3..%#.
(%3& is 4dos like and is an extension of the bash's "%@" syntax).

Bye,

-- 

Steffen Kaiser

The current maintainer of [email protected]
http://freedos.sourceforge.net/freecom/FreeCOM.html