Question

I’m trying to create an alias for a command to see the memory use,

ps -u user -o rss,command | grep -v peruser | awk '{sum+=$1} END {print sum/1024}'

but, the naive,

#.bash_aliases
alias totalmem='ps -u user -o rss,command | grep -v peruser | awk '{sum+=$1} END {print sum/1024}''

gives errors:

-bash: alias: END: not found
-bash: alias: {print: not found
-bash: alias: sum/1024}: not found

I’ve tried with double quotes,

totalmem ="ps ... |awk '{sum+=$1} END {print sum/1024}'", or

totalmem ='ps ... |awk "{sum+=$1} END {print sum/1024}"',
escaping,

totalmem ='ps ... |awk \'{sum+=$1} END {print sum/1024}\'',
or escaping double quotes … but I can’t seem to make it work.

totalmem ='ps ... |awk \"{sum+=$1} END {print sum/1024}\"',

gives the error

awk: "{sum+=}
awk: ^ unterminated string

Any tips appreciated.

Answer 1

You almost have it, the $ will be expanded in double-quotes, so that needs extra escaping:

alias totalmem='ps -u user -o rss,command | grep -v peruser | awk "{sum+=\$1} END {print sum/1024}"'

Or with the pattern inside awk as suggested by iiSeymour:

alias totalmem='ps -u user -o rss,command | awk "!/peruser/ {sum+=\$1} END {print sum/1024}"'