ALIAS(1P)

✨ ALIAS(1P) ✨

okay bestie, welcome to the POSIX Programmer's Manual page for alias, and omg you're gonna love her. she's giving main character energy and she's literally just here to name things for you. 💅

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💖 PROLOG 💖

so like, real talk first: this manual page is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual. the Linux implementation of this interface may differ (so if you're on Linux, go peek at the corresponding Linux manual page for the deets on how Linux actually does it), or honestly the interface may not even be implemented on Linux at all. no cap. 🫶

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🌸 NAME 🌸

alias — define or display aliases

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

alias [alias-name[=string]...]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

the alias utility shall create or redefine alias definitions, or write the values of existing alias definitions to standard output. an alias definition gives you a string value that shall replace a command name whenever that command name is encountered — see Section 2.3.1, Alias Substitution for the whole lore. ⭐

an alias definition shall affect the current shell execution environment and the execution environments of the subshells of the current shell. but listen — when used as specified by this volume of POSIX.1‐2017, the alias definition shall not affect the parent process of the current shell, nor any utility environment invoked by the shell. see Section 2.12, Shell Execution Environment. so she's influential but she knows her lane, periodt. 💜

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

None. (iconic of her honestly — zero flags, zero drama) 🙈

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🍓 OPERANDS 🍓

the following operands shall be supported:

• alias-name — write the alias definition to standard output.
• alias-name=string — assign the value of string to the alias alias-name.

if no operands are given, all alias definitions shall be written to standard output. so you can just ask her "who are you" and she'll spill everything. 😭

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🌈 STDIN 🌈

not used. (she doesn't want your input, she's booked and busy) ✨

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💜 INPUT FILES 💜

none.

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🌸 ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES 🌸

the following environment variables shall affect the execution of alias:

• LANG — provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. (see the Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Section 8.2, Internationalization Variables for the precedence of internationalization variables used to determine the values of locale categories.)
• LC_ALL — if set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization variables.
• LC_CTYPE — determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single-byte as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments).
• LC_MESSAGES — determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error.
• NLSPATH — determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC_MESSAGES.

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🧚 ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS 🧚

default.

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⭐ STDOUT ⭐

the format for displaying aliases (when no operands or only name operands are specified) shall be:

"%s=%s\n", name, value

the value string shall be written with appropriate quoting so that it is suitable for reinput to the shell. see the description of shell quoting in Section 2.2, Quoting. she quotes herself properly because she's a professional. 💅

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🎀 STDERR 🎀

the standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages.

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🦋 OUTPUT FILES 🦋

none.

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💖 EXTENDED DESCRIPTION 💖

none.

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🔥 EXIT STATUS 🔥

the following exit values shall be returned:

• 0 — successful completion.
• >0 — one of the name operands specified did not have an alias definition, or an error occurred.

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😭 CONSEQUENCES OF ERRORS 😭

default.

the following sections are informative. (translation: they're the vibes section, not the rules section)

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🫶 APPLICATION USAGE 🫶

none.

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✨ EXAMPLES ✨

1. create a short alias for a commonly used ls command:

alias lf="ls -CF"

2. create a simple ``redo'' command to repeat previous entries in the command history file:

alias r='fc -s'

3. use 1K units for du:

alias du=du\ -k

4. set up nohup so that it can deal with an argument that is itself an alias name:

alias nohup="nohup "

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👑 RATIONALE 👑

the alias description is based on historical KornShell implementations. known differences exist between that and the C shell. the KornShell version was adopted to be consistent with all the other KornShell features in this volume of POSIX.1‐2017, such as command line editing. consistency queen. 💅

since alias affects the current shell execution environment, it is generally provided as a shell regular built-in.

historical versions of the KornShell have allowed aliases to be exported to scripts that are invoked by the same shell. this is triggered by the alias -x flag; it is allowed by this volume of POSIX.1‐2017 only when an explicit extension such as -x is used. the standard developers considered that aliases were of use primarily to interactive users, and that they should normally not affect shell scripts called by those users; functions are available to such scripts. (so no sneaky exporting without saying so, bestie.) 🚫

historical versions of the KornShell had not written aliases in a quoted manner suitable for reentry to the shell, but this volume of POSIX.1‐2017 has made this a requirement for all similar output. therefore, consistency was chosen over this detail of historical practice. she chose growth. 🌱

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💀 FUTURE DIRECTIONS 💀

none.

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• Section 2.9.5, Function Definition Command
• the Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter 8, Environment Variables

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🎀 COPYRIGHT 🎀

portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form from IEEE Std 1003.1-2017, Standard for Information Technology -- Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, 2018 Edition, Copyright (C) 2018 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc and The Open Group. in the event of any discrepancy between this version and the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee document. the original Standard can be obtained online at http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html .

any typographical or formatting errors that appear in this page are most likely to have been introduced during the conversion of the source files to man page format. to report such errors, see https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html .

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okay that's the whole page, you ate that fr fr 💖 this was IEEE/The Open Group, 2017 — ALIAS(1P) — and she said what she said. slay, go define some aliases bestie 🦋✨🎀