10.4 Aliases in ksh and bash

Virtually everything we've said about aliases applies to the Korn shell (ksh ) and bash . One thing that's different is the syntax of the alias command, which is:

$ alias name

=definition

That is, you need an equal sign (no spaces) between the name and the definition. A good guideline is to use single quotes (' ) around the definition unless you're doing something specialized and you understand how quoting (8.14 ) works in aliases.

You also can't put arguments inside an alias as the C shell's \! operator (10.3 ) does. To do that, use a shell function (10.9 ) .

Korn shell aliasing is "overloaded" with a few other functions - like keeping track of the locations of executables. However, this shouldn't prevent you from defining your own aliases as you need them.