[lug] alias or another trick

[Davide Del Vento]

Hi all,
I have a script (more on it later) that is compiling a program. It
needs to use two different compilers, namely cc_r and xlC. The problem
is that it has a problem in the way it invokes xlC. It does:

xlC cc_r <rest-of-the-compiler-arguments>

I was hoping to fix it with something like

alias "xlC cc_r"=xlC

But of course aliases cannot contain spaces (at least in bash on AIX -
sorry this isn't a pure-Linux question). Now, the right answer is "fix
the script", but this is not feasible - the script is python's
distutils and is untouchable and unfixable (today is your lucky day:
I'll spare the long rant on this subject :-)

An easier trick could be do alias cc_r to nothing, but I can't do
that, since there are other (previous) calls which invoke cc_r alone -
and that part works (after I fixed several other issues, don't think
that it works out of the box :-)

And by the way, distutils isn't like make (which doesn't recompile
stuff that's already compiled): it recompiles everything, any time is
re-run. So running once, then alias cc_r to nothing and run again will
not work.

Does anybody have a suggestion on how to fool it? What I would do at
this time is write a script, call it xlC, put it somewhere in the path
earlier than the actual xlC, and use it as "middleman" to the actual
xlC removing the broken cc_r argument (if any). This would work, but
since I'm writing a script to pass to other people for doing this
installation, it's a little too dirty and requires an additional file
(I know I can do it with an herefile, and I would, but still it's
dirtier than the one-liner alias would be).

Thanks and Merry Christmas!
Davide