Bash – Why Doesn’t My Script Recognize Aliases?

aliasbash

In my ~/.bashrc file reside two definitions:

  1. commandA, which is an alias to a longer path
  2. commandB, which is an alias to a Bash script

I want to process the same file with these two commands, so I wrote the following Bash script:

#!/bin/bash

for file in "$@"
    do
    commandA $file
    commandB $file
done

Even after logging out of my session and logging back in, Bash prompts me with command not found errors for both commands when I run this script.

What am I doing wrong?

Best Answer

First of all, as ddeimeke said, aliases by default are not expanded in non-interactive shells.

Second, .bashrc is not read by non-interactive shells unless you set the BASH_ENV environment variable.

But most importantly: don't do that! Please? One day you will move that script somewhere where the necessary aliases are not set and it will break again.

Instead set and use variables as shortcuts in your script:

#!/bin/bash

CMDA=/path/to/gizmo
CMDB=/path/to/huzzah.sh

for file in "$@"
do
    $CMDA "$file"
    $CMDB "$file"
done
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