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Is there a way to expand aliases inline in bash?

$bash>alias ll='ls -l '
$bash>ls -l 
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2 Answers 2

up vote 40 down vote accepted

You can press Ctrl-Alt-e to perform the readline function shell-expand-line which will do alias, history and word expansions. Note that on some keyboards Meta is not Alt. You might need to press Esc then Ctrl-e

The functions alias-expand-line and history-and-alias-expand-line are not bound by default, but you can bind them by adding lines similar to the following to your ~/.inputrc file.

"\e\C-l": alias-expand-line

which would make Ctrl-Alt-l (lower case "ell") perform only alias expansion.

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Can we map alias expansion to <tab> without affecting other bash completions?. –  asdfg Feb 19 '11 at 15:44
@asdfg: If you do, it will break other completions. It might work (untested) to create the map as shown above and then add this additional map to replace the existing one for Tab: "\C-i": "\e\C-l\e\e" which creates a macro that performs both alias-expand-line and complete. It depends on the binding from my answer above and that the default binding for Esc-Esc remains in place. You would still be able to do Esc-Esc if you wanted to do default completion. –  Dennis Williamson Feb 19 '11 at 16:03
ESC and then CTRL+E works on OS X, thanks! –  Chris Wagner Sep 11 '13 at 21:24

This does not work. But I'm guessing/hoping something like this can be done to do what you want to do. You would have to use your own completion script. This is how you make one:

     COMPREPLY=(ls -l)
     #The next line does not work. I just hope there were a way to replace that word
     COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1]="ls -l"
complete -F _ll ll

Now source the full bash_completion file(http://caliban.org/bash) and put the above mentioned script in a file inside bash_completion.d directory that the script you get from the url references. Let me know if it doesn't work.


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