Hi all

I'm trying to use aliases within function but am having problems like:

bash: arrayshome: command not found

The alias 'arrayshome' is available via the command line, but not when I call a function which uses it. Can someone clarify the scoping behaviour of aliases in BASH, as I've so far only found general comments like this:

"Bash uses the POSIX.2 scoping rules, which make the function execution environment an exact copy of the shell environment with the replacement of the shell's positional paramters with the function arguments."

Can someone clarify this? I just want to know whether I need to code around it, or whether there is something funky going on, as it looks to me like this should work.

Thanks

Nath

You can use aliases within a function.

Yes, that's what I thought.

It turns out that it loses scope if you try and run it via a function sourced from a different file.

So I have a general functions file which I source at the start of all of my scripts. This contains an Execute function which catches errors. I was calling:

Execute myalias

This was causing the errors, but reverting to just the command and implementing error catching in the caller works fine.

A slight pain, but easily avoided, if a little verbose.

Ta

Nath

An excerpt from the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide
you can try to transform your aliases into functions and see if they work the way you expect.