I am a newbie at using paramters in my bashrc (or a file function), and while I eventually
converged on a solution in all other case, an alias for scp . To be concrete, the following
alias

alias scpm1="scp $1 userid@100.1.1.1.:/home/userid"

does not work (nor do these commands in a bash script file). An example of the error message
is as follows

joe@100.1.1.1 :scpm1 mozilla.ps
joe@ 100.1.1.1 's password:
scp: /home/joe/.: not a regular file

It does not matter if I place the intended location in single or double quotes. This command by itself,
not as an alias, and not as a bash script (such as)
#!/bin/bash
scp $1 userid@100.1.1.1.:/home/userid
(with $1 substituted by the filename)
works fine.

Thanks for any assistance that you can provide

AFAIK it is not possible to do VaraibleSubstitution with aliases.

Bash will exand the command "scpm1 TESTING" in place to
"scp $1 userid@100.1.1.1.:/home/userid TESTING"
whicj looks like "scp userid@100.1.1.1.:/home/userid TESTING"
Because $1 is empty...


The script you wrote will work for exact the same reason.

Congrats, you found the difference between a (short) shellscript and a command allias.
Here's your t-shirt :-)


Happy hacking!

sorry that my verbiage was unclear - the script file does not work, and, in fact, generates
the same error message that the alias does. So, somehow variable substitutions are not
working in the script I have defined.

But your scrit is perfectly ok,
I just tested it. (but I knew it would work all the time :-)

Are you using the same name fore the script as for the alias?
If so, bash would do the alias substitution first, so you script will never get executed.

Try calling your script directly like:

I used unalias to clear the old alias, and then it works fine - thanks for continuing this thread, as this simple script (and one's like it) will save me lots of time (and save me from lots of typing mistakes).