Re: [PATCH] Allow aliases to expand to shell commands

On Sat, 10 Feb 2007, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

If the alias expansion is prefixed with an exclamation point, treat
it as a shell command which is run using system(3).

ACK. This should also make it possible to do pipelines etc as aliases, 
although to be *really* useful we would probably have to have some way to 
specify where the arguments to the alias would go.

The more generic solution is obviously to just do it as external shell 
scripts (which can be named "git-xyzzy" so that you don't even need this 
kind of thing), but for the simple cases like gitk/qgit/xmerge/whatever, 
this approach by Ted seems to be a good way to get easy access to stuff 
that doesn't need anything fancier..

			Linus