Bash – How to Expand Aliases Inline

aliasbashexpansion

Is there a way to expand aliases inline in bash?

$bash>alias ll='ls -l '
$bash>ll<tab>
$bash>ls -l

Best Answer

You can press Ctrl-Alt-e to perform the readline function shell-expand-line which will do alias, history and word expansions. Note that on some keyboards Meta is not Alt. You might need to press Esc then Ctrl-e

The functions alias-expand-line and history-and-alias-expand-line are not bound by default, but you can bind them by adding lines similar to the following to your ~/.inputrc file.

"\e\C-l": alias-expand-line

which would make Ctrl-Alt-l (lower case "ell") perform only alias expansion.

Related Solutions

How to tell bash not to expand aliases

Put a backslash before the first character.

$ alias ls="echo foo"
$ ls
foo
$ \ls
bin
Desktop
Documents
  ...

.bashrc loading aliases from different file

When you use alias ${alias_line}, the variable is broken up at spaces, ignoring quoting rules.

There are two ways you could fix it:

Remove all quoting from the alias file:
```
ll=ls -lart
psu=ps -fu $USER
```
and put the variable itself in quotes:
```
alias "$alias_line"
```
This works because in bash, ll="ls -lart" and "ll=ls -lart" are exactly equivalent.
Alternatively (this is a better and more common way), have a file with alias commands, and use the . builtin (aka source) to import it.
```
alias pico='nano'
alias psu='ps x'
alias ll='ls -lart'
```
then in your ~/.bashrc:
```
. ~/.aliases
```

The second method is better, since it does not limit you to aliases, but also allows defining functions, which are much more powerful.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to tell bash not to expand aliases

.bashrc loading aliases from different file

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