Defining special characters

[gast at ucla-cs.UUCP]

In article <413 at wuphys.UUCP> jmc at wuphys.UUCP writes:
>
> but it has no special character >keys e.g.  `|', ``', `@', etc.
>
>  My plan was to define these keys by setting a
>variable equal to them (e.g. set pipe=|).
>But naively doing so fails; unix recognizes it as
>the symbol `|' but not as a pipe.

In the Bourne shell this is easy:

eval comd1 $pipe comd2

David Gast