Why doesn't it work when I issued the command: sh dir

[May_3]

Hi,

I issued the following commands:
$ alias -x dir='ls -al'
$ sh dir
sh: dir: not found

Thanks!
Best Regards.,
May

[Wodisch]

Ni Hao, May!

Aliases are only known within the shell where they were defined - not in sub-shells!

Sorry,
Wodisch

[May_3]

Hi, Wodisch

With the option -x, aliases are exported. And an exported alias is defined across the subshell environments.
I got the above words through 'man aliasa', but it doesn't work. I wondered why?

Best Regards.,
May

[Sukant Naik]

Hi May,

There are two issues here. What are you doing is creating an alias called dir and tyring to run it as script by doing sh dir.

Obiviously the shell will not find by any filename named dir and it will not execute.(Provided you have no file named dir in the directories defined in the PATH variable)

So you need to do
$ alias -x dir='ls -al'
$ sh
$ dir

The second issue is of the alias getting supported to the child shell. Well, here is an issue. When I checked the man pages for alias. It clearly mentions that when we use -x option alias gets exported to the child shell. But when I tried that it did not work.

Anybody in the forum who can help us.

- Sukant

[Ralph Grothe]

This puzzles me too.

e.g.

$ alias -x myos="uname -sr"
$ myos
HP-UX B.11.00
$ alias -x|grep myos
myos='uname -sr'
$ sh -c "alias -x|grep myos"
$ echo $?
1

As far as I know the export of aliases or functions are advanced shell features which may only be available in shells such as Bash or sh-posix.
But on the other hand the regular sh on HP-UX claims to be of the latter type.
Hmm...

Thus, I would suggest to create a dot file
$HOME/.shrc
and put therein all your aliases you want to have available in every (not only login) shell.
Then in $HOME/.profile put
ENV=$HOME/.shrc
export ENV

[Niraj Kumar Verma]

hey look like PATH problem

tyr

$ sh ./dir

or use full path name if it
is in your home directory then
try

$sh $HOME/dir

-Niraj