Question

I have a script that takes a command and executes it on a remote host. It works fine, for example:

$ rexec 'ant build_all' 

will execute the ‘ant build_all’ command on the remote system (passing it through SSH, etc).

Because I’m lazy, I want to set up an alias for this command (and ultimately, several others), such that, for example, I can just invoke

$ rant build_all 

and bash will it will automatically invoke

$ rexec 'ant build_all' 

I tried doing this with alias, but if I define

alias rant=rexec ant 

then any arguments passed to ‘rant’ will just be appended to the end, like so:

$ rant build_all -Dtarget=Win32 (interpreted as:) $ rexec 'ant' build_all -Dtarget=Win32 

This fails, because rexec really takes just one argument, and ignores the others.

I could probably do this with a bash wrapper script, but I was wondering if bash had any built-ins for doing this for me, perhaps a named-argument version of alias, or a perl-like quote string command (e.g. qw/ / ), or some such.

Answer 1

For all arguments, this will work.

function rant () {     rexec 'ant $*' } 

You may need to adjust the quoting, depending on what arguments you’re passing.