cshell alias: How to use nested single quotes(') in in cshell alias

Question

I am trying below alias in cshell:

alias sll 'ls -l \!* | grep -oE '[^ ]+$' | paste -s | xargs ls -l'

For this CSH says, Illegal variable name.

If I use \$, alias will be set without any error. But when I use this alias, I get, grep: Invalid regular expression

PS:

1. The aim of this alias is to achieve ls -Ll <filenames> but with full path of the file the symbolic link references.
2. The RHS part of alias works fine as standalone command.
3. Instead of egrep (grep -E), I tried awk '{print $NF}'. Even for this, CSH gives the error: NF undefined variable.

Answer 1

Check your single quotes. Single quotes don't magically nest.

alias sll 'ls -l \!* | grep -oE '\''[^ ]+$'\'' | xargs ls -ld --'

That's still flawed for several reasons:

• Because of [^ ], that won't work for file or link target names that contain spaces.
• as you're treating that list as a list of lines, that won't work with file/link target names that contain newline characters.
• because of xargs, that won't work with file/target names containing apostrophes, backslashes, double quotes, other types of blanks.
• For symlinks with relative paths as their targets, that only works for symlinks in the current directory as what you pass to the second ls is a relative path to the current directory, while symlinks are resolved relative to the path of the symlink file (if you have a a/b/c -> d link, that's to a/b/d, not d in the current directory).
• you'll get a spurious error message because of the first total <n> line of the output of ls.
• for symlinks to symlinks, that won't give you the same as ls -lL (may be what you want though).

With zsh, you could make it:

ls -ld -- *(:A)

The :A modifier expands symlinks to their canonical absolute path.

A quasi-equivalent on GNU systems:

readlink -fz -- * | xargs -r0 ls -ld --