This section describes more advanced uses of command aliases.
The p4subst
special operator allows you to edit specs. It
is roughly analogous to doing the following in a shell pipeline:
| sed 's/regular_expression/literal/g'
The p4subst
special operator should normally be used in an
alias as fellows:
something > $(output) && p4subst "regular expression" "literal replacement" < $(output) > $(result) && something else < $(result)
As an example, consider the string substitution in the following alias:
newChange $(desc) = change -o > $(chg) && p4subst "$(LT)enter.*$(GT)" $(desc) < $(chg) > $(chg2) && change -i < $(chg2)
The alias replaces the default change description with the argument
provided to p4 newChange description
.
To create an alias file for each workspace, add the following line to
your P4CONFIG
file:
P4ALIASES=$configdir/p4aliases.txt
Since your P4CONFIG
file is found wherever you might be
working and that location is known by the special $configdir
value, you can have a P4ALIASES
file that is specific to
this workspace and which is conveniently found no matter where you are in
that workspace.