[SOLVED] Need help creating a bash alias

[Snowhog]

I want to create a bash alias for this awk command:

awk -F'@' '{gsub(/\./, "", $1); print $1 "@" $2}' gmail_block_log.csv > cleaned_email_addresses.txt

My awk foo sucks, and Google isn't being very helpful. I know we have talent here in KFN, so, a little assistance please?

[die.boer]

add an alias to your ~/.bashrc.
the command contains quotes, it's easier to wrap the whole alias in double quotes and escape the $ signs

alias cleanemails="awk -F'@' '{gsub(/\./, \"\", \$1); print \$1 \"@\" \$2}' gmail_block_log.csv > cleaned_email_addresses.txt"

reload your shell:

source ~/.bashrc

now simply run

cleanemails

PS:Aliases are best for very short commands. Since this one is fairly complex, a function is easier to read and can later accept arguments...

[Snowhog]

Thank you. Geez. I though writing this alias would be 'harder' with the escapes and such. But it works perfectly just enclosed in quotes. By the way, I am quite familiar with bash aliases; I use them a lot. But there are times; and I thought this was going to be one of them; that some extra foo is required to translate a complex bash command line command into an alias.

[skyfishgoo]

aliases have their limits

i tried to write an alias for 'watch find -not \( -path './snap' -prune \) -not \( -path './.cache' -prune \) -type f -mmin -1 -printf "%C+ %p\n" | sort -n | tail -10'

but ended up putting the watch command into a bash script and just calling the script with the alias.

you can write a function directly into .bash_aliases, but i find it clutters up the file too much if gets complicated, so things are easier to manage in a collection of scripts.