Expand aliases in non-interactive shells

Question

In bash, we can use shopt -s expand_aliases to expand aliases in scripts.

What are the equivalent commands for zsh, csh, and tcsh? Do they even exist?

In focusing my efforts on zsh, I haven’t found such a command. I even tried sourcing the file with the aliases inside the script, but it did not work.

Idaliaidalina

zsh seems to expand alias in default. Could you write some example code which does not work in zsh ? – Hudnall

If I have my aliases set in (for example) ~/.zshrc and I source ${HOME}/.zshrc at the top of a script, that script will not be able to use the aliases that exist in ~/.zshrc. – Idaliaidalina

Answer 1

For zsh you can use setopt aliases

#!/usr/bin/zsh

alias hoo="echo bar"
unsetopt aliases
hoo # outputs `./test.zsh:5: command not found: hoo`
setopt aliases
hoo # outputs `bar`

see man zshoptions for detail.

For csh and tcsh, sourcing the files (source ${HOME}/.cshrc, for example) suffices.

Hudnall

Figured out how to do it in csh and tcsh: using source on the relevant files suffices. – Idaliaidalina

the option aliases is on by default in zsh (at least, as of Feb 2019) – Notepaper