That snippet is copied from:

perldoc -q format

Found in /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/pod/perlfaq4.pod
How do I reformat a paragraph?

But it doesn't work in bash, .bashrc

But from the commandline I can run:

which does work. source_file.txt gets formatted, wrapped at 72 chars. per line.

So my question is: Is there a way to get the working command into an alias that works? All of my existing alias on the right of the = begins with ' and ends with '

examples aliases that works:
alias adf='df --human-readable'
alias cmx='chmod u+x'

Thanks.

--
Alan.

well the $* part doesn't make sense. as you can see in your correct examples, "cmx" doesn't alias to "chmod u+x $*" does it? that might be all you need, if not, you should be able to escape any nasties with a leading \ but if you just run the alias command without any options it'll show you the current alias so you can see if any synax issues have arisen during the alias assignment.

That (in .bashrc) works. I'm not sure if it's totally right. But it works.

With Perl and the Text::Autoformat from CPAN Perl module installed that above alias allows me to do:

al@AB60R:~$ fmt junk.txt
al@AB60R:~$

where junk.txt had really long lines in it and now the lines have been formatted and wrapped at 72 characters per line.

Thanks. And, any more help or info on what's going on here with this alias in .bashrc is appreciated.

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Alan.

well it'll just be bash itlsef trying to be clever, nothing specific to alias itself. again, the \$* is superfluous.

Does it need to be an alias? Couldn't you put it into a script called fmt and make fmt executable?

Hadn't thought of that. It works.

#!/bin/sh
perl -i -MText::Autoformat -n0777 -e 'print autoformat $_, {all=>1}' $*

That, as a shell script named fmt, works.

al@AB60R:~$ fmt junk.txt

The above command gets junk.txt formatted.

BTW the $* likely may be a Perl special variable so that the junk.txt parameter on the command line provides_ability/is what the Perl command then runs on the file junk.txt

Thanks.

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Alan.

I think if you use single quotes instead of double quotes it'll work.

$* in bash contains the current argument list. So, if you pass fmt junk.txt as its argument, $* is junk.txt. I believe perl continued the use of this convention.

Somewhere (I think in the O'Reilly bash book), it says, "$* contains the current argument list. By itself, $* is equivalent to $1, $2, and so on up to the number of arguments. The construct "$*" is equivalent to "$1, $2, ..." which glues all the arguments into a single argument."

Oh, OK, I get it now. Since is using a bash shell, that is the bash argument list that is passed to Perl in this case.

It's a "command liner" Perl script (meant to be run from the command line -- in a shell, bash in this case).

That's not Perl's argument list. @ARGV is Perl's argument list. Do a www search for: @ARGV

For instance, a different case scenario: if we have a Perl script and in a shell we call_up/execute that Perl_file/script and also at the same time in the shell, call_up/pass an argument list of files then this argument list goes into Perl's @ARGV

Now, whether or not bash's $* gets used in this latter to pass to Perl's @ARGV, I don't know.

But in a Perl file (shebang line: #!/usr/bin/perl) $* I've not ever seen used. Here it is @ARGV

But of course the shell can be used to execute just such a Perl file as well as pass args to the Perl_file/script. But in this case, Perl's argument list is @ARGV

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Alan.

$* would be used in a script file. alias is NOT a script, so it means nothing at best.

alias just swaps one string for another before execution. no parameters are passed anywhere, as alias has nothign to do with parameters at all.

Yep, you're right. Bash uses $*; perl uses @ARGV, the array of parameters passed in. I guess you can tell I'm more familiar with bash.

enclosing the commands in back-tics should make it work:
alias fmt="`perl -i -MText::Autoformat -n0777 -e 'print autoformat $_, {all=>1}' $*`"