Nifty feature in VMS alias mechanism
Daniel R. Levy
levy at ttrdc.UUCP
Sat Aug 9 03:44:38 AEST 1986
In article <1065 at jade.BERKELEY.EDU>, mwm at eris.berkeley.edu writes:
>You forgot what I considered the nicest feature of the VMS alias mechanism:
>
> $ r*edo:==<etc>
>
>will make any prefix of "redo" down to "r" valid as a redo. Similarly,
>
> $ ch*eck:==<etc>
>
>will make any prefix of "check" down to "ch" a valid as a check. Nice
>feature, that. I just wish some Unix shell (ksh, preferably) had it.
>
That might be a good idea, but you can also get this effect by using
ln to link the executable to entries by the shorter names, e.g.
ln /bin/who /bin/wh
ln /bin/crypt /bin/cryp; ln /bin/crypt /bin/cry; ln /bin/crypt /bin/cr;
(Which prompts another aside on VMS; why oh why is there a SET FILE/ENTRY
under VMS if DELETE-ing the extra entry blows away the file data itself,
leaving any other entries for that file invalid? Why isn't a link count
kept a la the UNIX (TM of AT&T) OS even if VMS doesn't have inodes?)
--
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| dan levy | yvel nad | my own and are not at all those of my em-
| an engihacker @ | ployer or the administrator of any computer
| at&t computer systems division | upon which I may hack.
| skokie, illinois |
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