alias trouble [SOLVED]

[erinsaurus87]

Hi all,
I've been trying to set up my first permanent alias and I'm running into a problem now that Im not sure what to do about. For some reason when I want to start my vpn software I have to use this series of commands (my system admin set it up), rather than the gui interface. This is fine but I'd like to use an alias for it.

The commands are:

$ cd /opt/cisco/vpn/bin

$ sudo ./vpnui

And then I type in my password and the program runs.

I want to set up an alias for this so I put this in my .bash_aliases file:

[code]alias vpn='cd /opt/cisco/vpn/bin | sudo ./vpnui'

[/code]

When I try to use my new alias it asks me for my password for sudo but then gives me this error:

./vpnui: command not found

Why does this command not work inside the alias but works fine when I do it by hand?

Thanks

[doctordruidphd]

Re: alias trouble

alias vpn='cd /opt/cisco/vpn/bin | sudo ./vpnui'

Because you don't want to pipe the output of the cd command, you want to run the two in sequence.

Try: alias vpn='cd /opt/cisco/vpn/bin && sudo ./vpnui'

But I don't know if this will work either. You might be better off setting this up as a shell script

[dibl]

Re: alias trouble

Why not simply

sudo /opt/cisco/vpn/bin/vpnui

The only reason you needed to cd to the directory was so you could issue the command from that location and skip the full path.

[erinsaurus87]

Re: alias trouble

Thanks guys, both of those solutions worked. I thought when I used the "|" symbol that I was having those two commands run in succession. Time for me to go google piping now...