moin moin Eric, An alias will only get expanded in place of a command. $ .. # .. gets replaced by Matt's alias ( if you have it ) $ cd .. # is the string ÿ..' aliases are not expanded in every location, just the first place. From the bash man page: "Aliases allow a string to be substituted for a word when it is used as the first word of a simple command." Not sure what happens if you use sudo to run an alias. If the alias is available ( since you're changing users that's not absolutely certain ), I would think it gets expanded when sudo tries to run the command. sudo .. I think that would switch to the root user, then try to run the .. command. If Matt's alias is available, then it would be run ( rather pointlessly in this case ). I believe sudo would be handed .. as the command rather than Matt's alias expansion. command completion functions might change that such that "sudo .." would auto-expand the alias to "sudo cd .." on the command line. ciao, der.hans Am 27. Oct, 2010 schwätzte Eric Shubert so: > On 10/27/2010 01:02 PM, Matt Graham wrote: >> From: Eric Shubert >>> On 10/27/2010 12:30 PM, Matt Graham wrote: >>>> alias ..='cd ..' >>>> alias ...='cd ../..' >>>> >>>> ....and I don't believe you can write a script named ".." without >>>> a lot of fooling around.... >>> What happens though when you try to use the real command? Does it >>> result in: $ cd cd .. >> >> "man bash" , the ALIASES section: >> >> The first word of the replacement text is tested for aliases, but a word >> that >> is identical to an alias being expanded is not expanded a second time. >> This >> means that one may alias ls to ls -F, for instance, and bash does not try >> to >> recursively expand the replacement text. >> >> No idea what non-bash things do. >> > > That doesn't appear to me to say you won't get > $ cd cd .. > if you type > $ cd .. > when your alias is defined. > > -- # http://www.LuftHans.com/ http://www.LuftHans.com/Classes/ # Freedom isn't everything, but without freedom you have nothing. - der.hans