Hacker News Reader

Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

I do something a bit special... Instead of naming my script foobarnator (and hence risking that another foobarnator may exist in the future and may clash with my script), I name my script foobarnatorToBeAliased.sh. Then in my list of aliases I alias foobarnator to foobarnatorToBeAliased.sh.

The alias itself looks a bit weird in that to pass arguments to an aliased command you need to use a function (in Bash at least AFACIT) but it all works fine.

As aliases aren't sourced when other scripts are running, I'm sure my scripts/commands ain't ever going to clash with anything.

I've been doing that since years.

It also works fine to add "wrappers" to existing commands: for example to add additional input sanitization catching common mistakes I'm making when calling some commands.

View on HN

> The alias itself looks a bit weird in that to pass arguments to an aliased command you need to use a function (in Bash at least AFACIT) but it all works fine.

No you don't:

    $ alias say=echo
    $ say beep
    beep

You do need to do something special the other way around (if you wrap a command in a function it needs to explicitly pass the arguments on).

Another advantage of aliases: in zsh at least, autocompletions of the aliased command Just Work (it breaks in wrapper functions)

What has always been a blocker for me to follow your example, is the desire to use many such scripts from the command lines provided inside an $editor or $email client. There probably is a way to configure both of them to see the aliases, but it's more straightforward to just have everything in the PATH.

Yes, it seems cleaner to just put "export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH" in $HOME/.bashrc. That avoids collisions with /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin. (Or rather, resolves collisions in favor of your personal bin directory.)

Your PATH is inherited by child processes that you start, including scripts that expect the system version of commands that have the same name as your commands.

Porque no los dos? It seems that

    function ,foo() { printf "Fooo\n"; }
    ,foo

actually works! (at least in my bash 5.0.17 shell)

I know this is unimportant, but the phrase is "¿Por qué no los dos?".

Thank you. In case others would wonder too: https://www.rae.es/espanol-al-dia/porque-porque-por-que-por-...

I used to do this, but it doesn't work with things like "watch".

I actually just learned from a different HN thread yesterday [1] that aliases do get expanded if you add this to your shell's rc file:

    alias watch='watch '

Specifically, if an alias ends with a space, it will cause the subsequent arg to be expanded as well. For example, try running:

    alias beep=echo
    watch beep hello # This will fail
    alias watch='watch '
    watch beep hello # Now it works!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31830879

Brilliant feature, but this is the sort of thing that reinforces the idea that CLIs have awful discoverability compared to GUIs.

Which is why CLIs should come with manuals - there is even a dedicated CLI program to view those (well multiple actually, because standards wouldn't be fun if there was only one).

I start my aliases with a period so that I have...

.foo1,.foo2, .foo3, and so on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com