[photon-torpedo]

Good question. Something to do with interactive mode?

  $ cat l.sh
  alias l=ls
  l
  $ sh l.sh
  file1  file2  l.sh
  $ bash l.sh
  l.sh: line 2: l: command not found
  $ bash -i l.sh
  file1  file2  l.sh

Edit: Ah yes, the man page says so.

> Aliases are not expanded when the shell is not interactive, unless the expand_aliases shell option is set using shopt

[mort96]

Thanks, I had no idea. I guess I've never used aliases in scripts, but I would've assumed that they'd just work the same as in interactive mode. Good to know.

[RhysU]

Why use an alias in a script? Or in general? Functions work everywhere.

[metadat]

Functions don't work everywhere. Bash functions only work in the current shell context unless exported via an `export -f myfun' statement in between the function declaration and downstream sub-shell usage.

Working example:

  pzoppin() {
      printf 'echo is for torrent scene n00bs from %s\n' "$*"
      trap "printf '%s\n' <<< \"$*\"" RETURN EXIT SIGINT SIGTERM
  }
  export -f pzoppin

  echo -e 'irc\0mamas donuts\0starseeds' \
      | xargs -0 -n 1 -I {} /usr/bin/env bash -c '
  echo hi
  pzoppin "$*"
  echo byee
  ' _ {}

The above will fail miserably without the magic incantation:

  `export -f pzoppin'

Why'd they design an otherwise perfectly usable, mapless language without default c-style global functions? :)

[sudahtigabulan]

I suppose aliases predated functions. Can't find a reference to support that, though. Just a possible reason.

BTW aliases come from csh, and there they support arguments, which makes them similar to functions.

[oguz-ismail]

Aliases are like C macros

    $ alias foo='seq 3 | '
    $ foo cat
    1
    2
    3

Functions are functions

[RhysU]

So then use $variables for evil syntactic tricks? That works everywhere. Functions where hygiene counts? Aliases never?

[oguz-ismail]

>use $variables for evil syntactic tricks

Can't do that without eval, which is another can of worms. Aliases are fine

[BoingBoomTschak]

Indeed, here are two lines atop my "util.sh" to regularize some strange non-conformant behaviours:

  [ "${BASH:-}" ] && shopt -s expand_aliases
  [ "${ZSH_VERSION:-}" ] && setopt SH_WORD_SPLIT