Nifty feature in VMS alias mechanism

[Daniel R. Levy]

In article <1065 at jade.BERKELEY.EDU>, mwm at eris.berkeley.edu writes:
>You forgot what I considered the nicest feature of the VMS alias mechanism:
>
>	$ r*edo:==<etc>
>
>will make any prefix of "redo" down to "r" valid as a redo. Similarly,
>
>	$ ch*eck:==<etc>
>
>will make any prefix of "check" down to "ch" a valid as a check. Nice
>feature, that. I just wish some Unix shell (ksh, preferably) had it.
>

That might be a good idea, but you can also get this effect by using
ln to link the executable to entries by the shorter names, e.g.

ln /bin/who /bin/wh
ln /bin/crypt /bin/cryp; ln /bin/crypt /bin/cry; ln /bin/crypt /bin/cr;

(Which prompts another aside on VMS; why oh why is there a SET FILE/ENTRY
under VMS if DELETE-ing the extra entry blows away the file data itself,
leaving any other entries for that file invalid?  Why isn't a link count
kept a la the UNIX (TM of AT&T) OS even if VMS doesn't have inodes?)
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