Finding defined aliases from a package's commands section

[herronelou]

Hello.

I'm finding myself in a situation where I need to define an alias which will in turn call another alias.
Now, this is not possible with doskey in windows cmd, but I was wondering if maybe it is possible to find already-defined aliases during the commands section so that I could "expand" my new alias at creation.

A more concrete example:

My Nuke package defines an alias nuke, which points at the right nuke exe (for example Nuke13.1.exe for Nuke13.1 on windows).
My other package foo needs to execute a nuke command line operation: nuke -t do-stuff.py my_file.exr, this command is too long so I would like to set alias('nuke -t do-stuff.py', 'do_stuff').
Foo, doesn't necessarily know which Nuke was resolved, so it doesn't know how to call Nuke13.1.exe -t do_struff.py, but using nuke directly doesn't work either because doskey will not resolve nested aliases.
Is there some real code that would do something similar to this pseudo_code:

nuke_alias = self.aliases.get('nuke')
alias('do_stuff', '{} -t do_struff.py'.format(nuke_alias)

I feel like I could get around that possibly by creating a .bat file as an intermediary step (one alias pointing at the .bat, and the .bat using the other alias), and I'm about to try if this works, but the downside of that is that .bat files are windows only, and I'd have to make variants for other OSes if going this route. Edit: Can't use doskey aliases in .bat files apparently, so that's not the way either.

[instinct-vfx]

Note that this can become really really tricky, specifically in cmd and specifically if you need to do things like using environment variables as parameters in a bat file. You can end up in escape madness quickly.

That said what about setting an env variable to the value of the alias when setting the alias and then looking for the env variable?

[herronelou]

Yeah I landed on setting a NUKE_EXECUTABLE env var on the nuke package. Not loving setting specific stuff upstream for downstream packages but I couldn't quite think of a solution that wouldn't be less interdependent.

…

On Mon, 17 Oct 2022, 23:16 Thorsten Kaufmann, ***@***.***> wrote: Note that this can become really really tricky, specifically in cmd and specifically if you need to do things like using environment variables as parameters in a bat file. You can end up in escape madness quickly. That said what about setting an env variable to the value of the alias when setting the alias and then looking for the env variable? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1400 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAJAV5ASDADHY6LUJ3FWJPDWDY6EJANCNFSM6AAAAAARHS4XYY> . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: <AcademySoftwareFoundation/rez/repo-discussions/1400/comments/3902527@ github.com>