Shell – fish: whitespace in alias

aliasfishshell

I am trying to alias an executable in a directory with a space in it. For example:

alias myfile="/home/ben/test case/myfile"

Now, this is not expanded the way I want (it thinks /home/ben/test is the executable). In bash you can add extra quotes:

alias myfile="'/home/ben/test case/myfile'"

Sadly, in fish this does not work. What should I do instead?

Best Answer

alias in fish is just a wrapper for function builtin, it existed for backward compatible with POSIX shell. alias in fish didn't work as POSIX alias.

If you want the equivalent of POSIX alias, you must use abbr, which was added in fish 2.2.0:

abbr -a myfile "'/home/ben/test case/myfile'"

or:

abbr -a myfile "/home/ben/test\ case/myfile"

Related Solutions

Bash Shell Quoting – Single or Double Quotes for Alias Definition?

In the example you mention, where the expansion for the alias is a single word containing no character that is subject to expansion, it makes no difference how you quote the name _cutf:

$ alias cutf="_cutf"
$ alias cutf
alias cutf='_cutf'

$ unalias cutf
$ alias cutf='_cutf'
$ alias cutf
alias cutf='_cutf'

$ unalias cutf
$ alias cutf=_cutf
$ alias cutf
alias cutf='_cutf'

As you can see in that interaction, recalling the value of the alias cutf gave the same result each time. So, yes, the quoting styles are interchangeable here.

It is not relevant that the expansion is to a function name: at least with bash, aliases perform a simple textual substitution (it is not obvious to me in what way defining an alias is useful; directly calling the underlying function seems just as easy).

Shell – Fish shell testing for existence of file in $PATH

Use type in fish like in Bourne-like shell:

if type -q figlet
  hostname | figlet
end

Or to limit to executables in $PATH (ignoring functions, builtins):

if command -s figlet > /dev/null
  hostname | figlet
end

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash Shell Quoting – Single or Double Quotes for Alias Definition?

Shell – Fish shell testing for existence of file in $PATH

Related Question