How not to use nested strong quotes (')

Question

I'm a relatively new user of zsh and don't know too much about shells (unfortunately). Nonetheless, I would like to define an alias in my .bashrc containing a hash. However, zsh doesn't seem to like it. My command would be basically used to replace a string in a LaTeX file with sed, run LaTeX over it and then undo the replacement thus something like

alias tex-build='
sed -i \
  's~\\newcommand{\\command}\[1\]{{here_is_the_command_stuff #1}}~\\newcommand{\\command}\[1\]{}~' \ 
  /path/to/mytexfile.tex && 
latex ... && 
sed -i \
  's~\\newcommand{\\command}\[1\]{}~\\newcommand{\\command}\[1\]{{here_is_the_command_stuff #1}}~' \
  /path/to/mytexfile.tex
'

Could anyone help me to find a way to get this alias running with the hash for the LaTeX command? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Firstly, zsh won't read .bashrc - that's a resource control file for bash, not zsh; you probably want to put this into .zshrc or your .profile.

Secondly, you can't simply nest quotes of any type. 'a long 'nested' string' is not a string with a nested quote in it, it is the quoted string a long , followed by a bare nested, followed by a quoted string string.

What you are trying to do should more likely be a function. And further, since you are modifying a file, performing a single-use operation on the modified form, and then changing it back, it would be much simpler to not modify the file and just send its modified form down a pipeline, thus:

tex-build() {
  sed \
    's~\\newcommand{\\command}\[1\]{{here_is_the_command_stuff #1}}~\\newcommand{\\command}\[1\]{}~' \ 
    /path/to/mytexfile.tex | latex ...
}