topic Re: alias in Operating System - HP-UX

alias

navin — Mon, 19 May 2008 20:43:21 GMT

Hello All,
I have to set up an alias for the command ,user has sh as login shell and few times he changes to bash and then execute the command which i'm trying to setup alias.
But it is not stable .Means it works if i do su - user. But for user it works until the session closes.Please let me know how can i make this as permanent for the user as well as system wide so that the alias will be there permanently
thanks much

Re: alias

Matti_Kurkela — Mon, 19 May 2008 23:41:43 GMT

Aliases are not inherited from the parent process to its children. If your user switches from sh to bash, the new bash shell will start as "interactive non-login shell", which means it doesn't read /etc/profile nor ~/.profile. Instead, it reads /etc/bash.bashrc and ~/.bashrc.

The exported environment variables are inherited from the parent shell, so they are not a problem - but the aliases will be gone.

Read the "INVOCATION" chapter in the man page of your bash shell to understand the process.

To get your alias to work, you must define it so that both login and non-login shells will read the definition. That may mean setting it in two places: /etc/profile (for login shells, both sh and bash) and /etc/bash.bashrc (for non-login bash).

If your /etc/bash.bashrc is fully POSIX sh compatible (=contains no bash-specific extensions), you might avoid duplication by defining the aliases in /etc/bash.bashrc only and making /etc/profile read that file by adding this to /etc/profile:
. /etc/bash.bashrc

MK

Re: alias

Rasheed Tamton — Tue, 20 May 2008 08:55:21 GMT

Hi Navin,

For bash shell for the user, you have to put alias commands in .bashrc in the home dir of the user.

vi /home/user/.bashrc
alias ll='ls -l'

Rgds.

Re: alias

Dennis Handly — Tue, 20 May 2008 09:06:03 GMT

>I have to set up an alias for the command

It might be easier to use a script in another PATH for that command.
You can also use functions that are found in FPATH.

Re: alias

Peter Nikitka — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:42:25 GMT

Hi,

I would create a seperate file containing aliases and source that from the different places needed, e.g. use
/etc/aliases.local
and then in /etc/profile, and so on:
...
# include aliases
[ -s /etc/aliases.local ] && . /etc/aliases.local
...

mfG Peter