ALIAS(1) General Commands Manual ALIAS(1)

NAME

alias — define or display aliases

SYNOPSIS

alias [alias-name[=string] ...]

DESCRIPTION

The alias utility creates or redefines alias definitions or writes the values of existing alias definitions to standard output. An alias definition provides a string value that replaces a command name when it is encountered. See Alias Substitution .

An alias definition affects the current shell execution environment and the execution environments of the subshells of the current shell. When used as specified by this specification, the alias definition will not affect the parent process of the current shell nor any utility environment invoked by the shell. See chap2(1).

OPTIONS

None.

OPERANDS

The following operands are supported:

alias-name: Write the alias definition to standard output.
alias-name=string: Assign the value of string to the alias alias-name .

If no operands are given, all alias definitions will be written to standard output.

STDIN

Not used.

INPUT FILES

None.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

The following environment variables affect the execution of alias :

LANG: Provide a default value for the internationalisation variables that are unset or null. If LANG is unset or null, the corresponding value from the implementation-dependent default locale will be used. If any of the internationalisation variables contains an invalid setting, the utility will behave as if none of the variables had been defined.
LC_ALL: If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalisation variables.
LC_CTYPE: Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single- as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments).
LC_MESSAGES: Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error.
NLSPATH: Determine the location of message catalogues for the processing of LC_MESSAGES .

ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS

Default.

STDOUT

The format for displaying aliases (when no operands or only name operands are specified) is: "%s=%s\n", name, value

The value string will be written with appropriate quoting so that it is suitable for reinput to the shell. See the description of shell quoting in chap2(1).

STDERR

Used only for diagnostic messages.

OUTPUT FILES

None.

EXTENDED DESCRIPTION

None.

EXIT STATUS

The following exit values are returned:

0: Successful completion.
>0: One of the name operands specified did not have an alias definition, or an error occurred.

CONSEQUENCES OF ERRORS

Default.

APPLICATION USAGE

None.

EXAMPLES

Change ls(1) to give a columnated, more annotated output:
```
alias ls="ls -CF"
```
Create a simple "redo" command to repeat previous entries in the command history file:
```
alias r='fc -s'
```
Use 1K units for du(1) :
```
alias du=du\ -k
```
Set up nohup(1) so that it can deal with an argument that is itself an alias name:
```
alias nohup="nohup "
```

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

None.