List all aliases starting with a particular string

Solution 1:

grep for them

1. Far better suggestion from the comments - grep on alias.

   You can list all your aliases, even the ones not written in ~/.bash_profile, by calling alias.

   grep the result to find the aliases starting from gt as:

   alias | grep "^alias gt"
   

2. Since the aliases are created by writing alias <alias_name>=..., to list the aliases starting with, for example, gt, you can do:

   grep "^alias gt" ~/.bash_profile
   

   The ^ in the grep argument is an anchor. The caret ^ and the dollar sign $ are meta-characters that respectively match the empty string at the beginning and end of a line.

   In ^alias gt, it implies that you want only those lines that start with "alias gt". On my machine, I get the following result:

   alias gts="git status" 
   alias gtd="git diff" 
   alias gtpull="git pull"
   alias gtb="git branch"  
   alias gtpush="git push"  
   alias gtpullmk="gtpull;./make all"  
   alias gtst="git stash"  
   alias gtstash="gtst save"  
   alias gtstlist="gtst list"  
   alias gtctall="runformatter;git commit -a"
   

3. Alternatively, you could grep without the anchor as:

   grep gt ~/.bash_profile
   

   Here, you are simply looking for any line that contains the substring "gt", anywhere. As a result, you may get some unnecessary lines, but you will get all aliases that use any of your git aliases.

   On my machine, I get the following output using this search. Notice the extra line at the top, which was not present in the previous output:

   alias debugmk="echows;gtb;${ws}/make ${DEBUG_OPTIONS}"  
   alias gts="git status"  
   alias gtd="git diff"  
   alias gtpull="git pull"  
   alias gtb="git branch"  
   alias gtpush="git push"  
   alias gtpullmk="gtpull;./make all"  
   alias gtst="git stash"  
   alias gtstash="gtst save"  
   alias gtstlist="gtst list"  
   alias gtctall="runformatter;git commit -a"
   

4. Finally, depending upon which command you find more useful (or even go for both if they both are useful), you can create a new alias to list all git related aliases:

   alias allgit="alias | grep gt"
   

Solution 2:

You can use the Programmable Completion Builtins compgen command with the a option. The syntax looks like:

compgen [option] [word]

The a option lists all the aliases and word matches all the aliases beginning with those characters. So, to answer your question to list all git aliases:

compgen -a gt

More info can be found with this command:

help compgen