Access position parameters in multi-command inline alias/command

Question

I'm trying to create an alias for a command that renames a folder and then tar-zips it:

alias txz='of=$1; nf=$of$(date -I); mv $of $nf; tar cJvf $nf.txz $nf --remove-files'

call with

txz test_folder

I get errors

mv: missing destination file operand after ‘2014-05-14’
Try 'mv --help' for more information.
tar: 2014-05-14: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
test_folder/
test_folder/1
test_folder/2
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

Because of multiple commands. If there is only one command (no ;), $1 works.

Is there any way to resolve it?

ps: here is the command to create the test folder:

mkdir test_folder; touch test_folder/1 test_folder/2

Answer 1

Better to make it a function like this as aliases don't have support for positional parameters like $1, $2 etc:

txz() {
   of="$1"
   nf="$of"$(date -I)
   mv "$of" "$nf"
   tar cJvf "$nf.txz" "$nf" --remove-files
}

Or to make in one line:

txz() { of="$1"; nf="$of"$(date -I); mv "$of" "$nf"; tar cJvf "$nf.txz" "$nf" --remove-files; }