How to get around quotes when defining alias

[Frank de Vries]

I would like to assign a perl one-liner command to an alias eg.
lt=' perl -e \'foreach(@ARGV){$t =localtime ( ( ( stat ( $_ ) ) [9] ) ); printf("%-20s %s\n",$_,$t);}\' *'
sh: Syntax error: `(' is not expected.

This gives an error as he es the second ' as a terminator.
How to get around this ?
Any trick for that ?
Or is it impossible ?

[OFC_EDM]

Hi Frank,

I'd like to test this out on my own system...how are you going to be using this alias?

Cheers

[Frank de Vries]

Not sure if I understand your question,
do you mean where I set the alias ?

I stick it in the /etc/profile so
I have it at my fingertips everywhere.

So when I login I just want to type lt

and that should do the perl one liner

[Dennis Handly]

As you learn when using ksh, you want to toss useless aliases. Use functions instead:
==============================================================
function lt {
perl -e 'foreach (@ARGV) {$t =localtime(((stat($_))[9])); printf("%-20s %s\n",$_,$t);}' "$@"
}

lt a*

[Torsten.]

IMHO he wants to know what it does - what is in $t?

[VK2COT]

Hello,

Ahh, tricky but possible. Interesting design.

One way:

lt="`perl -e 'foreach(@ARGV){$t =localtime ( ( ( stat ( $_ ) ) [9] ) ); printf(\"%-20s %s\n\",$_,$t);}' *`"

Cheers,

VK2COT

[Frank de Vries]

Thanks for your answers, looks promising
The perl oneliner just gives the seconds as well as the minutes, thus $t is time

[OFC_EDM]

Thanks now I understand what it's doing.
Looks like you have a solution now though.

Cheers

[OFC_EDM]

Frank that works nicely.

I put the lt= line in a script in my home directoy.

then I did alias lt='path/to/script'

Works like a charm