Bash Alias Adding a Background Process

bashrc

In my .bashrc, I want to put something like this.

alias lst='ls &'

So that I can do something like this.

$ lst /tmp

which will be translated into

$ ls /tmp &

How can I do the above?

Best Answer

Use a function instead.

lst() { ls "$@" & }

Related Solutions

Linux – running .bashrc versus new login

"exec bash" should do it. Basically just restarts the bash shell, reading .bashrc in the process.

Linux – How to escape commands in a bashrc alias

The shell expands the command line containing the alias command and passes something like td=touch 2010-09-17_21-54.txt to the alias command. You need to protect the special characters in the alias definition from expansion. The easiest way is to use single quotes instead of double quotes:

alias td='touch `date "+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M"`.txt'

Then td is an alias for touch `date "+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M"`.txt as desired.

Although it's not an issue here, I recommend using $(…) instead of `…`, so as to avoid difficulties with complex commands (backquotes have arcane and nonportable quoting rules, whereas dollar-parenthesis works intuitively):

alias td='touch $(date "+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M").txt'

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – running .bashrc versus new login

Linux – How to escape commands in a bashrc alias

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