confusion over the proper way to make an alias

confusion over the proper way to make an alias

[Timothy J Luoma]

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

Re: confusion over the proper way to make an alias

[Peter Stephenson]

Timothy J Luoma wrote:
> 
> 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.

That means you have function, as well as an alias, defined to ls().  It's
possible to have both, but only the function can fill your job table and
needs the `command ls' inside it.  (Also, remember the catch: if you define
an alias for ls, and the function next with 'ls() {...}', the alias
gets expanded in the definition, causing havoc.)

> 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

This should certainly work.  I can only think of checking paths, value
of $LS_OPTIONS, symbolic links, everything you've probably thought of.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@ifh.de>       Tel: +49 33762 77366
WWW:  http://www.ifh.de/~pws/       Fax: +49 33762 77413
Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron --- Institut fuer Hochenergiephysik Zeuthen
DESY-IfH, Platanenallee 6, 15738 Zeuthen, Germany.

Re: confusion over the proper way to make an alias

[Timothy J Luoma]

	Author:        Peter Stephenson <pws@ifh.de>
	Original-Date: Fri, 07 Nov 1997 16:33:34 +0100
	Message-ID:    <199711071533.QAA05401@hydra.ifh.de>

> That means you have function, as well as an alias, defined to ls().  It's
> possible to have both, but only the function can fill your job table and
> needs the `command ls' inside it.  (Also, remember the catch: if you define
> an alias for ls, and the function next with 'ls() {...}', the alias
> gets expanded in the definition, causing havoc.)

Nailed it.

Thanks Peter.

TjL, insanely stupid today