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Comment by lvncelot | Hacker News Reader

Another advantage of using alias: `which [alias]` actually tells you what that alias is mapped to, and not just the location of a script in your bin folder.

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On what shell? That doesn't work in bash. I use `type` for that, since it'll tell you if it's on PATH, a function, or an alias

which gdb /opt/homebrew/bin/gdb

~ type gdb gdb is aliased to `gdb -q'

In bash this is how I get git completions working (with bash functions rather than aliases):

    __git_complete grm _git_rm
    grm() {
      git rm "${@}"
    }

Internally git uses the __git_complete function to set up completions for its subcommands, though this may be specific to your OS/distro and perhaps or git version.

This does seem to ship as part of git now, here[1].

[1]: https://github.com/git/git/blob/6a64ac7b014fa2cfa7a69af3c253...

zsh for me

~ ▸ which k

k: aliased to kubectl

This is something I've never seen. `which` (at least on the hosts I currently have access to) is its own binary `/usr/bin/which` and unrelated to the shell and its aliases or abbreviations.

`type` is a builtin on both fish and bash though, and does resolve aliases.

[edit] TIL: `zsh` has its own `which`.

Some distros use an alias which pipes all the aliases into 'which', which has a flag that supports reading aliases from stdin.

Fedora does it. It's very convenient.

`alias | grep [alias name]` works as well, for me at least

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