I’ve done something similiar to this over the years for organization purposes and not having to change much between shells except add a path. You can also add cases that check your shell and do something slightly different if needed.
I like fish abbreviations. They are like aliases but expand when you press space or enter. That way you can edit it, and also still see the full command so you are less likely to forget it when you don’t have your aliases. Of course I have some scripts as well.
I actually use both in fish. I use aliases for some longer commands. For example I have
laas an alias foreza -la --icons=auto --group-directories-firstbecause I don’t really want to see it every time I runla. I use abbreviations for some shorter commands. For examplesystemctlabbreviated tosysandsystemctl --userabbreviated tosysu.And: Fish implements aliases as scripts! When you use alias —save, fish creates as script with a function in it.
Thanks for this info! Didn’t know about it! 😃
I use zsh with aliases, and Atuin which I find very convenient.
I’ll definitely try out fish abbr in combo with aliases. Logic in aliases is great.
I have never heard of anyone using aliases for anything but trivial one-liners. I don’t think people consider them as an alternative to scripts so I don’t really get the point of half of this post.
However, the part explaining the benefits of using scripts over aliases even for trivial one-liners is pretty neat.
I use aliases for renaming commands and making bash scripts look like real commands to the rest of my team.
That’s an anti-pattern if I’ve ever heard of one.
Which one?
Using aliases to rename commands.
Yeah, I can see how that could go wrong, in practice it’s used to alias a python version python2 to python and impacts about 10 build scripts. (Which should be rewritten, but no-one is going to prioritise that work)
Why not make them executable and stick them in bin
Mostly because there’s a profile everyone sources that’s relatively straightforward to that’s straightforward to get access to. Whereas I’d never get root level access.
You don’t need root level access though. What I usually do is stick a
PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.local/binand then place all the scripts in there.Wouldn’t that require me to have access to everyone’s home directory and need to dump the scripts in everyone’s?
Potentially I could set up an alt bin directory everyone has access to and configure that in the shared profile, the only drawback there is it might be less obvious whats going on if something breaks and someone else needs to take a look at it.
It was just an example of what I’m doing for my particular situation where I don’t have root access and I want some personal scripts for myself, I’m not saying you should choose the same location. If everyone is already sourcing the same file, I expect there’s already a shared storage you are maintaining that everyone has access to.
About something breaking, I guess it’s up to you and your team if you prefer functions, but it also means not everyone will need to be annoyed when someone else’s code has a small syntax error. And also I expect the only errors you are able to get feedback about right now would be only structural syntax errors for the function declaration (I expect you don’t have unit tests or anything like that for your bash functions…) so technically a function could still be broken and you wouldn’t know until you use it.
Scripts also give the advantage of being able to use other languages beyond bash, if perl/python or others are available.
Anyway, you are free to have your reasons, I was just saying that root access is not necessarily needed.
I also switched to scripts. Aliases tend to break in loops with modified IFS
Honestly, I’d rather record command and flags instead of relying on aliases to do that for me. Unless if its something very “niche” (like automatically pulling the required third party software everytime the distro boots up on .bash_profile).
Aliasing anything seems like an unnecessary abstraction in just about every instance.
Glad I don’t come across it or much other unnecessary stuff in my work.
