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Jas
Asked: 2014-03-12 04:55:27 +0800 CST

how to make alias with quotes

  • 772

I tried to make alias with quotes as following:

alias myalias='ps -ef | grep tomcat | kill -9 `awk {'print $2'}`'

but as you can see i already have ' in awk

so i tried to replace

awk {'print $2'}

with

awk {"print $2"}

but then strange things happen to me when i run this alias, ie, the console window get closed... how can i make this alias work

linux

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Using a function instead of an alias avoids most of these quoting problems:

    myfn() { ps -ef | awk '/tomcat/ {print $2}' | xargs kill -9; }

    If you're using awk, don't need grep.

    Or, stick with a function and avoid almost all the work you're doing:

    alias myalias='pkill -9 -f tomcat'
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  2. You can "glue" single quotes with double quotes :

    alias myalias='ps -ef | grep tomcat | kill -9 `awk {'"'"'print $2'"'"'}`'

    Here is an interesting reference : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1250079/escaping-single-quotes-within-single-quoted-strings

    However, there are simpler solutions to kill a process instead of using multiple pipes or additional single quotes (Cf others answers). Here i was just trying to answer your initial question, keeping your logic.

    • 4

  3. Here are the essentials for alias quoting:

    alias x='echo dollar sign: \$ "single quote: '\'' backslash: \\ double quote: \"."'
$ alias x
alias x='echo dollar sign: \$ "single quote: '\'' backslash: \\ double quote: \"."'
$ x
dollar sign: $ single quote: ' backslash: \ double quote: ".

    There is very little that cannot be done, virtually anything that can be typed on the bash command line can be put into an alias.

    • 4

  4. Instead of running these multiple pipes, use arguments to ps to get only the pid to start with:

    alias killtc='kill `ps -C tomcat -o pid=`'
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