0

I use the following command to count lines of code (skipping blank lines and comments) in python scripts:

sed '/^\s*#/d;/^\s*$/d' *.py | wc -l

This works just fine, and I am trying to turn this into an alias.

Seems that I am not escaping some characters properly, because this:

alias loc="sed '/^\s*#/d;/^\s*$/d' \$1 | wc -l"

does not work.

Kulfy
  • 17,696
Dominic
  • 1
  • You problem isn't to do with characters needing to be escaped, aliases just don't support positional parameters like $1. See for example Can I pass arguments to an alias command? – steeldriver Feb 05 '21 at 11:44
  • @steeldriver Aha, I see! Thank you! I changed it to: loc() { sed '/^\s*#/d;/^\s*$/d' $1 | wc -l }

    but calling this with: loc *.py does not produce the same output I expected, what am I doing wrong here?

    When I call, in the terminal: sed '/^\s*#/d;/^\s*$/d' *.py | wc -l it produces a different result.

     – Dominic Feb 05 '21 at 11:53
  • When you run loc *.py the shell expands *.py and passes the result to loc, where you only use $1 (i.e. the first matching file). Try changing $1 to "$@". – steeldriver Feb 05 '21 at 12:01
  • @steeldriver You were right, $@ did the trick, thank you so much! – Dominic Feb 05 '21 at 13:20

1 Answers1

0

With the help of steeldriver in the comments, I've created a function instead

loc() {   sed '/^\s*#/d;/^\s*$/d' $@ | wc -l }

which solved my problem

Kulfy
  • 17,696
Dominic
  • 1