Oh wise Monks:

I'm sure this question has been dealt with before, but I have been unable to find a satisfactory solution on the web.

I want a perl script to act as a wrapper for other shell commands. And I'd prefer not to hardcode the specific shell into the script, as many in my workplace use different shells (ksh, tcsh, etc).

Specifically, I want to write a simple diff wrapper. A lot of my keystrokes are spent piping commands (via shell aliases) to files and diffing the files. Then I have to delete the files or I have a bunch of useless files laying around and I can't remember what they're for.

So, for a simple example, something like:

> mydiff "ls -1 a/" "ls -1 b/"

would execute the ls commands, piping them to temp files, then open the predetermined diff tool on those 2 temp files, afterwhich, the temp files would be deleted.

However, if 'ls' is an alias to something, that alias is not picked up when using system or backticks.

Any help would be appreciated.

In reply to spawning shell commands with aliases by xafwodahs

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