TIA,
  MWT

Something close can be accomplished with aliases.  But you'll kill
yourself debugging whitespace issues.  Use {ba,k,}sh instead.

There really isn't any excuse for rudeness!

Kurt J. Lanza <k...@inforonics.com> wrote in message
news:3A773299.BEEA5836@inforonics.com...

If the man page doesn't mention functions, odds are
pretty good that the shell in question doesn't support
them. I say this knowing absolutely nothing about tcsh,
and never having looked at the man page for such, just
knowing in general what information is in the man pages.
As for rudeness, when you ask a question in a public
forum, you can expect all kinds of answers -- the usenet
is not known for the politeness and civility of its
participants.

You can use the 'alias' command instead. But this can become difficult
if you need quotes or if/then/else/endif constructs in your "function"
body.

This has been discussed recently in this newsgroup. To summarize, you
can declare "functions" quite easily if you use a meta-alias called
"make_alias" (sorry if its definition is incomprehensible).

See usage example at the end of the article.

Klaus Frank

alias make_alias '\\
    <<"end_alias" sed -e '"'"'\\
#\\!/bin/sed -f\\
#\\
## Make the eval command\\
# quote quotes\\
s/'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'/'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'/g;\\
# enclose with quotes\\
1s/^/eval '"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'/;\\
$s/$/'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'/;\\
#\\
## Make the alias command\\
# escape exclamation marks and newlines\\
s/\\!/\\\\!/g;\\
s/$/\\\\/g\\
# quote quotes\\
s/'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'/'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'/g;\\
# enclose with quotes\\
1s/^/alias @alias_name@ '"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'/;\\
$a\\\
;echo >/dev/null'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'"'\\
#^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ (workaround against printing of arguments)\\
'"'"' | \\
    sed -e s/@alias_name@/\!\!:1/ >/tmp/make_alias$$; \\
    source /tmp/make_alias$$; \\
    rm /tmp/make_alias$$; \\
'

make_alias example
        echo -n 'starting command "!!:1" .....'
        if ( { !!:1 } ) then
          echo ok
        else
          echo fail
        endif
"end_alias"

example true
example false