Can a soft link be created for an option of a command

[DipuK]

Hi,
Is it possible for me to create a soft link for an option of a command.
Eg: I can use "ln -s /sbin/ls my_ls" for creating a soft link for ls as my_ls in my current directory.

Now suppose I want to creat a soft link for ls -l explicitly. I mean i want an executable which has the functionality of ls -l is it possible.

I know this can be done in a simple manner with the alias command. But for curiosity I would like to know is there a method with ln

Cheers!!!!
Dipu

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

Sorry, no. There is no place within the inode to store the information.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Pete Randall]

Dipu,

It sounds to me that what you really need is an alias. In your "shrc" file for your shell, put the following line:

alias my_ls="ls -l"



Pete

[Suhas_2]

Hi Dipu,
If at all you want to do this, you can write simple one line scripts, which would internally invoke the commands in the specified directory with necessary arguments.
For example,
1> the contents of my_ls could be
/usr/bin/ls -l | pg

2> the contents of my_top could be
/usr/bin/top -m 10

3> A typical my_iostat would look like
iostat 1 10

These tools would prove handy in the long run.
I would follow this practice but with shorter command names.((;~))

Regards'
Suhas.

[Bill Douglass]

You can store the arguments along with the pathname in the symlink file. However, the system will treat the whole string as a pathname, rather then parsing it into a pathname and arguments.


So the following works:

ln -s "/usr/bin/ls" xyz
./xyz



While doing this fails:

ln -s "/usr/bin/ls -l" xyz
./xyz

-bash: ./xyz: No such file or directory