Call date inside an alias
Written by
oscarmlage
on
Stupidity of the day: calculate the date
in an double quoted bash alias
. It seems that, if you don't escape the date
call, it's called at the time of the alias
definition, so it's not the real behaviour I was looking for:
$ date +%Y%m_%H%M
201507_2252
$ alias foo="echo `date +%Y%m_%H%M`"
$ foo
201507_2252
Wait a minute and...
$ date +%Y%m_%H%M
201507_2253
$ foo
201507_2252
Not really usable when you want the date at the time you run the alias, not when it's defined, so you have to escape the date call this way:
$ date +%Y%m_%H%M
201507_2253
$ alias foo="echo `date +%Y%m_%H%M`"
$ foo
201507_2253
Wait a minute, or a couple of minutes and...
$ foo
201507_2255
That's all, stupid but so useful trick when you want to define something like:
alias test_cov="py.test -s --tb=native --cov proj --cov-report term-missing | tee logs/proj-`date +%Y%m_%H%M`.log"
Enjoy!