doskey macros not working from Insider build 15031

[chris-morgan]

From build 15002 onwards Clink stopped working; now it’s working again, except that doskey macros aren’t working (though they are outside Clink):

C:\Users\me>doskey /macros
g=git $*

C:\Users\me>g
'g' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

There doesn’t appear to be anything useful in clink.log.

[mattdkerr]

confirmed still not working in build 15063

[chris-morgan]

More importantly, 15063 is the Creators Update build which is being released to everyone on the 11th of this month, so starting in a week’s time everyone’s going to be upgrading to a build where clink breaks doskey macros.

Fixing this is now very urgent.

[anagnoad]

Sadly, Creators Update is already released through Windows 10 Upgrade assistant. :/ Is there any known workaround?

[chris-morgan]

The workaround I settled on was this:

1. Create %USERPROFILE%\bin and put it on the PATH. Alternatively work with a directory already in the PATH. It’s entirely up to you.
2. For each macro of the form foo=bar $*, create a file foo.cmd in the directory from the previous step, containing @bar %*. That is, change the $ to % and prepend an @.

It’s that easy!

Well, normally, anyway. If you have a macro with the same name as a binary, such as ls=ls --color=auto, you’ll need to make sure that your ls.cmd uses the full path to ls.exe, quoted if necessary (e.g. "C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\ls.exe"), and that it’s earlier in the PATH than ls.exe is. (This tends to mean that it needs to be in the system PATH variable rather than the user PATH variable. And then you can’t use %USERPROFILE%, you’ll have to expand it.)

[anagnoad]

That actually is easy, thank you for sharing. :)
I used to do it like that in the past, as I wanted to have custom shortcuts for Run (Win+R). But using a tool like Cmder introduced me to the beauty of having this managed just with a simple "alias foo=bar" command, so it would be hard to go back after that.

I have tried to start using bash or equivalents which are unaffected by Creator's Update. But then again, in the bash world (the WSL bash at least) you lose seemless Windows command line interop. :/

I hope the issue will be fixed soon.

[MonwF]

just another workaround from cmder issues cmderdev/cmder#1325

thanks to @phytemit

[anagnoad]

Is the issue fixed with #433? :)

[mattdkerr]

No, it is not.

[bannus]

For anyone that has a bunch of aliases you load from a file like I do, here's a quick powershell script that you could adapt to use @chris-morgan's workaround:

$aliases = get-content .\aliases.doskey
foreach ($alias in $aliases) {
    if (!$alias -or $alias[0] -eq '#') {
        continue;
    }
    $tokens = $alias.Split('=');
    $filename = "$($tokens[0]).cmd"
    $command = "@$($tokens[1].Replace("$", "%"))"
    # change TODO to directory in PATH
    # $command | Add-Content "TODO/$filename"
    write-host $filename
}

[bitcrazed]

We're looking into this: Looks like it's caused by us fixing behavior to operate correctly, but this breaks Clink's logic.

Anyone know how to reach @mridgers directly?

[mattdkerr]

There's also a PR to fix Clink but the owners haven't merged it #464