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Artur Meinild
Asked: 2021-02-27 07:54:41 +0800 CST

How to create aliases with "overlapping" names to existing commands? [duplicate]

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Let's say I want to create an alias called ss for the command sudo -s. But ss is already an existing command, so I want to create another alias called sst for the command ss.

If using just the normal command names, this is not possible, since aliases:

  1. Are not set in a way that respects the order, and
  2. Reference other aliases, instead of only referencing commands

So if I try the following:

alias sst='ss'
alias ss='sudo -s'

Running the command sst results in running sudo -s, which is not my intention.

How can this be done?

bash

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    For the above to work, you need to reference the absolute path of the command you want to run.

    The can be done with the following:

    alias sst='/usr/bin/ss'
alias ss='sudo -s

    However, one can't always be sure ss is at that location, so a more solid approach would be:

    alias sst='$(which ss)'
alias ss='sudo -s

    Now the above works as expected, where ss runs sudo -s and sst runs the command ss.

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