confusion over the proper way to make an alias

[Timothy J Luoma <luomat+zsh+users@luomat.peak.org>]

I have been setting up a new zsh account on a LINUX machine running ZSH  
3.0.3 and found that I could not use:

alias ls="ls $LS_OPTIONS"

I had to use

alias ls="command ls $LS_OPTIONS"

or else I got the 'job table full' message mentioned in the FAQ.



I went to my NeXT machine running 3.0.5 and found that if I used:

alias ls="command ls $LS_OPTIONS"

I got:
/usr/local/gnu/bin/ls: ls: No such file or directory

but if I used

alias ls="ls $LS_OPTIONS"

then it worked OK.


Can someone explain what is going on and what the proper way to set the alias is?

Thanks

TjL