[comp.sys.amiga.tech] ASH piping and aliases

cs121jj@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (03/02/90)

How do you specify piping within an alias?

In WShell, this works just as expected:

        alias ls LITERAL dir | less
                or
        alias ls="dir | less"

but this does not work at all in ASH (the ARP shell):

        alias ls=dir | less

the pipe gets parsed first (even though the alias is a valid command and is
the first command on the line!) and you end up with an empty less window
waiting for you to hit 'q' to get out of less.  This leads me to believe that
piping is either not complete in ASH, or ASH doesn't like piping in an alias.

All I wanted to do was to send the output of dir to less so I can view it
easily.  Is that too much to ask?