Fwd: Help command behavior with aliases

[Sławek Żak <slawek.zak@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mistakenly sent in private mail to Bart. Can you help?

/S


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sławek Żak <slawek.zak@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 21:41:35 +0100
Subject: Re: Help command behavior with aliases
To: Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 19:00:35 +0000, Bart Schaefer
<schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Feb 28,  7:14pm, ( Text in unknown character set UTF-8 not shown ) wrote:
> }
> } When aliasing a command and running it from CLI, help for the command
> } (Escape-H) is called for alias expansion, like in:
> }
> } % portupgrade zsh (type Esc-H)
> } <manpage for nice appears if you do alias portupgrade='nice portupgrade'>
> }
> } Strange and unpleasant as well. Any reason to keep it this way?
>
> Suppose you have
>
>   alias LL='ls -lL'
>
> Do you want run-help to display the man page for "ls", or do you want it
> to simply fail because there is no LL command?
>
> However, it's probably possible to rewrite the run-help function so that
> it skips command prefixes (coproc, nice, time, etc.) in alias expansions
> and displays the help for the following word instead.
>

Doh,

You're right. I've got a friend aliasing vi to v. I should've thought
of it. All the aliases I use indeed are just innocuous prefixes to
standard commands, or options I like for the commands to save me some
typing. Could you explain, how to change run-help behavior?

As a side note, I used to like and use compctl in the old days of 3.x.
Now the powerful-completion-engine NT seems to be the thing. I had an
alias which let me use

% stop apache

this would run /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache.sh stop, *and* complete
apache grokking the whole path (two paths actually, /etc/rc.d and the
above).

Can I get the completion part easily now?

Thanks for your swift response, /S