Shell Bash: Passing argument to alias

Question

Hello,

Is it possible to do the following:

I want to run the following: mongodb bin/mongod

in my bash_profile I have

alias = "./path/to/mongodb/$1"

Thanks everyone!

Answer 1

what you ask is very unclear, but I guess you will have better luck with functions. aliases are not very flexible

Answer 2

Usually when I want to pass arguments to an alias in Bash, I use a combination of an alias and a function like this, for instance:

function __t2d {                                                                
         if [ "$1x" != 'x' ]; then                                              
            date -d "@$1"                                                       
         fi                                                                     
} 

alias t2d='__t2d'                                                               

Answer 3

An alias will expand to the string it represents. Anything after the alias will appear after its expansion without needing to be or able to be passed as explicit arguments (e.g. $1).

$ alias foo='/path/to/bar'
$ foo some args

will get expanded to

$ /path/bar some args

If you want to use explicit arguments, you'll need to use a function

$ foo () { /path/to/bar "$@" fixed args; }
$ foo abc 123

will be executed as if you had done

$ /path/to/bar abc 123 fixed args