this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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I use aliases for renaming commands and making bash scripts look like real commands to the rest of my team.
That's an anti-pattern if I've ever heard of one.
Which one?
Using aliases to rename commands.
Yeah, I can see how that could go wrong, in practice it's used to alias a python version python2 to python and impacts about 10 build scripts. (Which should be rewritten, but no-one is going to prioritise that work)
Why not make them executable and stick them in bin
Mostly because there's a profile everyone sources that's relatively straightforward to that's straightforward to get access to. Whereas I'd never get root level access.
You don't need root level access though. What I usually do is stick a
PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.local/binand then place all the scripts in there.Wouldn't that require me to have access to everyone's home directory and need to dump the scripts in everyone's?
Potentially I could set up an alt bin directory everyone has access to and configure that in the shared profile, the only drawback there is it might be less obvious whats going on if something breaks and someone else needs to take a look at it.
It was just an example of what I'm doing for my particular situation where I don't have root access and I want some personal scripts for myself, I'm not saying you should choose the same location. If everyone is already sourcing the same file, I expect there's already a shared storage you are maintaining that everyone has access to.
About something breaking, I guess it's up to you and your team if you prefer functions, but it also means not everyone will need to be annoyed when someone else's code has a small syntax error. And also I expect the only errors you are able to get feedback about right now would be only structural syntax errors for the function declaration (I expect you don't have unit tests or anything like that for your bash functions..) so technically a function could still be broken and you wouldn't know until you use it.
Scripts also give the advantage of being able to use other languages beyond bash, if perl/python or others are available.
Anyway, you are free to have your reasons, I was just saying that root access is not necessarily needed.