Ubuntu – alias not working inside bash shell script

14.04aliasbashscripts

When I search for .bashrc files in my system I get:

/etc/bash.bashrc
/etc/skel/.bashrc
/root/.bashrc
/usr/share/base-files/dot.bashrc

I changed:

/etc/bash.bashrc   
/root/.bashrc

I added the alias.

alias urldecode='python -c "import sys, urllib as ul; \
    print ul.unquote_plus(sys.argv[1])"'

alias urlencode='python -c "import sys, urllib as ul; \
    print ul.quote_plus(sys.argv[1])"'

When I run the command:

urlencode 'http://example.com space'

it works OK from the command line, but when I create an .sh file and put the same command there I get:

./tf.sh: line 19: urlencode: command not found

What is wrong?

Contents of tf.sh file:

IP=$(curl -d "tool=checurl"-X POST https://site.com/get.py)
url='https://site.com.com/'
path=$(grep -oP '(?<=get.py\?filetype=csv\&data=).*?(?=\")' <<< $IP)
pathfull="get.py?filetype=csv&data=$path"

full=$url$pathfull

#echo $full

urlencode '$full'

Best Answer

Some comments:

  1. When writing a bash shell script you are expected to start the script with:

    #!/bin/bash

  2. There is a known issue - Why doesn't my Bash script recognize aliases? - that bash script doesn't recognize aliases.

One option to solve the issue is:

At the beginning of your script (after the #!/bin/bash) add:

shopt -s expand_aliases

Following by source of the file with the aliases:

source /etc/bash.bashrc
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