Create a simple alias for route command

Question

I'd like to create a simple alias:

alias gate=route | grep default | awk '{print $2}'

and even though the command does work in terminal, it's not working through ~/.bash_aliases. Thanks.

Answer 1

You need to put quotes around the pipeline - being careful to ensure that $2 doesn't get expanded by the shell. So for example

alias gate='route | grep default | awk "{print \$2}"'

or

alias gate="route | grep default | awk '{print \$2}'"

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Note that awk can do pattern matching - so you don't really need grep:

alias gate="route | awk '/^default/ {print \$2}'"