Every day is a school day - Bash and macOS and aliases etc.

 So I've been using Bash on various Unices for the longest time - I think I started with BSD back in the late 90s, and then switched to various distributions of Linux, via AIX, and now mainly working with macOS ( which is kinda BSD / Darwin ) and Ubuntu.

Anyway, that's the scene setting out of the way ...

I've got a whole load of aliases set up in my Mac's shell, via ~/.bash_profile - examples include: -

alias hist='history | cut -c 8-'

alias ic='/usr/local/bin/ibmcloud'

alias coverage='go test ./... -coverprofile coverage.out && go tool cover -html=coverage.out'

etc.

So I've been writing a Bash script to query my IBM Cloud account and list out the various resources that I've created, including OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) clusters, Virtual Private Clouds (VPC), subnets, security groups etc.

And I wanted this script to use my alias for the ibmcloud command-line interface (CLI) tool, namely ic ...

As an example: -

#!/usr/bin/env bash
ic version

but, when I ran this, I saw: -

./foo.sh: line 3: ic: command not found

I changed my script to dump out my aliases: -

#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo "My aliases are : "
alias
ic version

which returned: -

My aliases are :

./foo.sh: line 6: ic: command not found

Thankfully, Google came to my aid ...

So today I learned ...

1. There's a difference between .bash_profile and .bashrc

.bash_profile is executed for login shells, while .bashrc is executed for interactive non-login shells.

Source: What is the difference between .bash_profile and .bashrc?

So, really, I should be putting my aliases in .bashrc rather than .bash_profile ...

Or duplicating them #yuck

2. I can choose to source .bash_profile from .bashrc meaning that non-interactive shells will pick it up

3. If I add: -

#!/usr/bin/env bash -I

and: -

shopt -s expand_aliases

to my Bash script, I can get the best of all worlds.

Therefore, my test script now looks like this: -

#!/usr/bin/env bash -i

alias

shopt -s expand_aliases

echo "My aliases are : "

alias

ic version

and (a) returns all of my aliases and (b) works 

So I have added: -

if [ -f ~/.bash_profile ]; then

    source ~/.bash_profile

 fi

to ~/.bashrc and also changed my scripts to include: - 

#!/usr/bin/env bash -i

and: -

shopt -s expand_aliases