15.3 Adding { } Operators to Korn (and Bourne) Shells

The bash and C shell curly brace operators (9.5) are handy for working with strings. Some versions of the Korn shell can be configured to make these work. [2] If your Korn shell can't do that, or if you use the Bourne shell, you can use the shell function (10.9) called qcsh. (You can rewrite it as a shell script (44.2) if your shell doesn't have functions.) It writes the command line you type into a temporary file, then gives the file to the C shell. [3] Type qcsh, a space, and the command line you want to run. Here are two examples from article 9.5: to fix a typo in a filename (change fixbold61.c to fixbold6.c):

[2] If your system has Korn shell sources, your system administrator can edit the file OPTIONS and set BRACEPAT=1, then recompile.

[3] In some versions of UNIX, passing the command line to the C shell with csh -fc "$@" wouldn't expand the braces. That's why I used a temporary file.

$ qcsh mv fixbold{61,6}.c

To edit ten new files that don't exist yet:

$ qcsh vi /usr/foo/file{a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j}

Here's the function:

-f	qcsh() { echo "$@" > /tmp/q$$ csh -f /tmp/q$$ rm -f /tmp/q$$ }