shell functions

For so long, I have been creating aliases for my shell. "dir" would be "ls -la" and things like that. TCSH even had ways to retrieve some attributes to the aliases. building 20 student programs and testing them would have merely required me to type N (for next), B (for build) and T (to launch simple tests). Do I need to fix something to better evaluate their program ? B again, then T again.

But it had its drawbacks, and it was pretty ugly to code. Nowadays, I'd do that with shell function instead. Rather than trying to rewrite the statement, it truly allows me to extract all the arguments (either separately or together) and then calling one or more commands

cl()
{
    color.pl $* | less -R
}

One last place here I used aliases is with the "quick cd" tool I use to keep my brain sane and my screen not-excessively-cluttered

#!/usr/bin/bash

export CITY=$(pwd)
echo "You are in the City. $CITY"
echo "You can set 4 locations. North, South, East and West."

alias setN='export NORTH=$(pwd)'
alias setW='export WEST=$(pwd)'
alias setE='export EAST=$(pwd)'
alias setS='export SOUTH=$(pwd)'
alias setC='export CITY=$(pwd)'

alias N='cd $NORTH'
alias S='cd $SOUTH'
alias E='cd $EAST'
alias W='cd $WEST'
alias C='cd $CITY'

And yes, it pretends that you're running an old-fashioned, text-based adventure game instead of crawling directories. Because i found it easier to thing of thinks as "west", "north", etc. rather than trying to remember what letter I used for "gstreamer" and what letter was for "alsa".