So, I was trying to run mysql on my computer at home to do some rails stuff (just playing around, and moving a CS 360 project to my computer so I could see it at home - I'm running OSX 10.5, if that's important), and it works fine, but to start the daemon the installation is requiring that I be in the directory with the mysql bin/ folder. I thought that was kind of annoying, so I decided to make an alias in my .bashrc to change directories, start the process, then change back. Probably an easier way to do it would be to put in the alias all of the options that make it so I don't have to do the change directories business, but I'm not sure what all of those options are. Anyway, this was the alias that I put in .bashrc: alias 'mysql-start'='cd ~/Documents/mysql-5.0.51b-osx10.5-x86; bin/mysqld_safe --defaults-file=my.cnf &; cd ~-' Now, you would think that would work fine (at least I did), but apparently bash doesn't like the ampersand along with semicolons, because it wouldn't let me do it until I took out the ampersand. But that's annoying, because then if I suspend the process and put it to the background, it's still tied to that specifc terminal, and I would prefer to not have to suspend it and put it into the background myself.
Actually, in the process of writing this I thought of a better solution - I put a symbolic link to my installation directory where mysql was expecting the mysql folder to be. That fixed the whole problem, and I don't have to cd anymore in the alias, and I don't need the semicolons, so the ampersand works. But I'm still sending this because I'm curious about why the ampersand and the semicolon aren't friends. Is there a way to get around this and still run processes in the background if you want to enter a one line, multi-statement command? Matt Gardner -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
