Re: [PATCH] Allow aliases to expand to shell commands

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Feb 10, 2007, 18:04 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0702101000100.8424@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <11711235042388-git-send-email-tytso@mit.edu>

On Sat, 10 Feb 2007, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

>
> If the alias expansion is prefixed with an exclamation point, treat
> it as a shell command which is run using system(3).

ACK. This should also make it possible to do pipelines etc as aliases, although to be *really* useful we would probably have to have some way to specify where the arguments to the alias would go.

The more generic solution is obviously to just do it as external shell scripts (which can be named "git-xyzzy" so that you don't even need this kind of thing), but for the simple cases like gitk/qgit/xmerge/whatever, this approach by Ted seems to be a good way to get easy access to stuff that doesn't need anything fancier..

			Linus