Using awk in BASH alias or function

Question

I've a command that works just fine at the command line, but not when I try to put it in an alias or function.

$ awk '{print $1}' /tmp/textfile 0 

That's correct, as '0' is in position 1 of "textfile".

$ alias a="awk '{print $1}' /tmp/textfile" $ a 1 0 136 94 

That's the entire line in "textfile". I've tried every variety of quotes, parentheses and backticks that I could imagine might work. I can get the same problem in a wide variety of formats.

What am I not understanding?

Answer 1

You need to escape the $ like so:

 alias a="awk '{print \$1}' /tmp/textfile" 

Otherwise your alias is:

 awk '{print }' /tmp/textfile 

Which prints the whole file...

Answer 2

Use a function instead of alias

myfunc(){ awk '{print $1}' file; }