i want to have an alias "t" to enter a folder and list the content there.
i tried with:
alias t="cd $1; ls -la"
but it just listed the folder i typed but did not enter it. i wonder why?
cause when i use this one:
alias b="cd ..; ls"
it went back to the parent and listed the content.
so i want the "t" do enter the folder i type in too.
someone knows how to do this right?
You can't pass arguments into bash aliases. You'll need to create a shell function like so:
function t { cd "$1" && ls -la; }
Edit: whoops, forgot the function and edited per Juliano's suggestion.
function t or t() at the beginning.
; with &&. It doesn't make a lot of sense to run ls if the user mistypes the directory name.I don't think you can use aliases that way. You can, however, declare a function:
function t {
cd "$1"
ls -la
}
cd is tricky in bash. The command you issued ran in a separate process than your bash shell, and that process terminated when it was done. See Why doesn't "cd" work in a bash shell script?
cd command (chdir) cannot be implemented as an external. It must be a shell built-in in order to be useful. (That's because it changes the shell's own process state). For similar reasons the read and export and set commands must also built-ins.In most UNIX shells (csh, bash, zsh) aliases are a form of expansion. Thus they are not parsed like functions. Any word in the interactive input stream which would be processed as a command will be scanned against the list of aliases and a simple string replacement will be performed (usually before any other forms of expansion).
If you need to process arguments then you want to define a function which is parsed and processed rather than simply being expanded like a macro.