How do I use quotes in sed within quotes?

Question

how do I get this

ls -1 | sed 's/\(.*\)/alias \1 "shot \1"/'

into an alias?

Example:

alias asdf "ls -1 | sed 's/\(.*\)/alias \1 "shot \1"/'"

The problem is when I get to the quotes for the alias.

Answer 1

Like this:

alias asdf="ls -1 | sed 's/.*/alias & \"shot &\"/'"

You forgot the assignment operator (=); to get double quotes within double quotes, you have to escape them with \".

Also, I've changed your capture group and backreference to using &, which stands for the complete match.

Notice that programmatically processing the output of ls is not recommended. A robust solution would, for example, use find or fileglobs (like anubhava's answer), but the main point of the question is about escaping double quotes.

Answer 2

You missed the equal symbol and you must escape double quotes. Try this:

alias asdf="ls -1 | sed 's/\(.*\)/alias \1 \"shot \1\"/'"

Answer 3

Don't use aliases, use a function:

my_func() {
  ls -1 | sed 's/.*/alias & "shot &"/'
}

You should however avoid parsing the output of ls. Please read the link!

In your case, assuming no there is no newlines in the file names, one can use ^0:

my_func() {
  printf '%s\n' * | sed 's/\(.*\)/alias \1 "shot \1"/'
}

^0 Which leaves you with the same problems parsing ls would, but without without invoking the extra process, as printf is buildin.

Answer 4

Assuming your filenames only contain alphanumerics or DOT or underscore, you should avoid parsing output of ls. Another pitfall is use of pipeline in your command which will create alias only in subshell not in current shell.

You can use this for loop instead:

for f in *; do
   alias $f="shot $f"
done