[morningsam]

An alternative method for avoiding collisions in PATH is to use really long executable names that are unlikely to be used by other executables and then have shorter aliases for them in your bashrc. The aliases won't affect executables called from within scripts and you can still refer to your executables by their long names in your own scripts.

One drawback is that this doesn't have the same tab completion ergonomics, which I have to admit is really nifty.

EDIT: And another is that collisions can still occur in scripts that need to be sourced rather than executed as a sub-process (like Python's venv activation scripts). But those are rare.

[olejorgenb]

> One drawback is that this doesn't have the same tab completion ergonomics, which I have to admit is really nifty.

They do in zsh

[morningsam]

I meant specifically that you can quickly see all your custom scripts (and only them) by tab-completing comma itself. Of course aliases have regular tab completion in bash as well.

[olejorgenb]

Ah, I thought you referred to completion of parameters etc. not working for aliases. I checked again now, and this does not work for bash.

Of course - your own custom scripts usually wont have so fancy completion, and in any case you'd need to configure this and setting it up for both the long and short version is not that much hassle.