Question about expr

[Manish Jain]

Dan Nelson wrote:
> In the last episode (Mar 27), Manish Jain said:
>> I am used to the normal GNU-version of expr (also available on Solaris)
>> and much prefer it over the FreeBSD version.  The GNU version allows
>> internal commands like length, substring and others which make it much
>> easier to work with.  Is there any way I can replace FreeBSD's native expr
>> with the GNU version ?  Since I believe expr does not normally ship as a
>> shell-builtin, I don't think the shell can of much help in the matter.
>>
>> Actually, I think it might not be a bad idea to place a port of GNU-expr 
>> in the ports directory. This would allow a lot a scripts to be readily 
>> portable to multiple environments.
>
> It's part of the coreutils package.  If you install the sysutils/coreutils
> port, you can symlink /bin/expr over to it (or make a copy).  I don't know
> if it's 100% compatible with BSD expr, though, so you may end up breaking
> scripts in the base system.
>

Hello Dan,

Thanks for the info. But I don't intend to symlink /bin/expr over to it. 
Instead I'll just create an alias in bash's profile and my scripts.

That should let core scripts execute with /bin/expr and my scripts to 
use the GNU-version. Which actually leads me to second question :

When you execute a script, it will automatically pick up the exports in 
.bash_profile. But even if you manually source bash's profile at the 
start of your script, only the exports get picked up and the aliases are 
ignored. Is there some way to fix this so that I don't have to set an 
alias for expr at the top each time I write a script ?


Thanks & Regards

Manish Jain
invalid.pointer at gmail.com