How to use aliases defined in .bashrc in other scripts?

In ~/.bashrc, I defined some aliases. But I cannot use them in other shell scripts, where I can only use aliases defined right there. Even though I sourced bashrc, it still did not work. What should I do?

PS. I'm in bash.

Solution 1:

You need to do shopt -s expand_aliases in the script in addition to sourcing ~/.bashrc.

Solution 2:

The simplest answer is to do the 2 important things or it wont' work.

#!/bin/bash -i

# Expand aliases defined in the shell ~/.bashrc
shopt -s expand_aliases

After this, your aliases that you have defined in ~/.bashrc they will be available in your shell script (giga.sh or any.sh) and to any function or child shell within such script.

If you don't do that, you'll get an error:

your_cool_alias: command not found

Solution 3:

I had this problem and I reloaded the file with this command to fix it.

$ source ~/.bashrc 

Solution 4:

Stolen from enzotib on ask ubuntu: Alias are deprecated in favor of shell functions. From bash manual page:

For almost every purpose, aliases are superseded by shell functions.

To create a function, and export it to subshells, put the following in your ~/.bashrc:

petsc() {
    ~/petsc-3.2-p6/petsc-arch/bin/mpiexec "$@"
}
export -f petsc

Then you can freely call your command from your scripts.

Solution 5:

.bashrc is meant for one purpose: to configure the environment for your interactive shells. If you have code that you want shared between your .bashrc and other scripts, then it belongs in a separate file that is sourced by each of your .bashrc and shell script.