How to find out where alias (in the bash sense) is defined when running Terminal in Mac OS X

How can I find out where an alias is defined on my system? I am referring to the kind of alias that is used within a Terminal session launched from Mac OS X (10.6.3).

For example, if I enter the alias command with no parameters at a Terminal command prompt, I get a list of aliases that I have set, for example:

alias mysql='/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql'

However, I have searched all over my system using Spotlight and mdfind in various startup files and so far can not find where this alias has been defined. ( I did it a long time ago and didn't write down where I assigned the alias).

For OSX, this 2-step sequence worked well for me, in locating an alias I'd created long ago and couldn't locate in expected place (~/.zshrc).

cweekly:~ $ which la
la: aliased to ls -lAh

cweekly:~$ grep -r ' ls -lAh' ~
/Users/cweekly//.oh-my-zsh/lib/aliases.zsh:alias la='ls -lAh'

Aha! "Hiding" in ~/.oh-my-zsh/lib/aliases.zsh. I had poked around a bit in .oh-my-zsh but had overlooked lib/aliases.zsh.

you can just simply type in alias on the command prompt to see what aliases you have. Otherwise, you can do a find on the most common places where aliases are defined, eg

grep -RHi "alias" /etc /root

First use the following commands

List all functions

functions

List all aliases

alias

If you aren't finding the alias or function consider a more aggressive searching method

Bash version

bash -ixlc : 2>&1 | grep thingToSearchHere

Zsh version

zsh -ixc : 2>&1 | grep thingToSearchHere

Brief Explanation of Options

-i     Force shell to be interactive.

-c     Take the first argument as a command to execute

-x      -- equivalent to --xtrace

-l      Make bash act as if invoked as a login shell

Also in future these are the standard bash config files

/etc/profile
~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login or ~/.profile
~/.bash_logout
~/.bashrc

More info: http://www.heimhardt.com/htdocs/bashrcs.html