How do you set alias sudo='nocorrect sudo ' correctly?
The behavior is reproducible with:
alias sudo='nocorrect sudo '
alias mv='nocorrect mv '
So, when executing sudo mv foo bar
this gets expanded to
nocorrect sudo nocorrect mv foo bar
and throws an error as nocorrect is a shell reserved word and cannot be handled by sudo.
The reason that the mv alias gets expanded is that you define alias sudo='nocorrect sudo '
with a trailing blank, which enables alias expansion afterwards. Without that trailing blank this example works, but you loose the capability to use aliases after sudo completely.
A workaround to have alias expansion generally after sudo, but to prevent the error with sudo mv
escape the mv
command when using it with sudo:
sudo \mv foo bar
This prevents the alias expansion of mv.
Ok, I've been digging into this for a while and have found some stuff on the zsh mailing list. There doesn't seem to be one "silver bullet" solution but a bunch of different solutions which do different things. I'm going to post what I've done (which is a bit of a cop out) but also explore the other approaches and their problems. I'm personally going to go with:
➜ ~ alias sudo='sudo '
➜ ~ alias nsudo='nocorrect sudo'
EDIT:
I am now going to go with
sudo \mv foo bar
for the cases where I need this as descibed by @mpy in the alternate answer.
/EDIT
because it will allow me to use aliases most of the time and when they complain because they're aliased to nocorrect I can use nsudo
so that I don't accidentally clobber my files.
Better approaches are from the zsh mailing lists. There appears to be two threads that I've found on this. One from 1999 here (that's the question, see the follow ups, especially this one which solves the noglob
problem. I am unsure if it solves nocorrect as well (does noglob imply nocorrect? otherwise I don't think it does, please comment)
alias sudo='my_sudo '
function my_sudo {
while [[ $# > 0 ]]; do
case "$1" in
command) shift ; break ;;
nocorrect|noglob) shift ;;
*) break ;;
esac
done
if [[ $# = 0 ]]; then
command sudo zsh
else
noglob command sudo $@
fi
}
Which satisfies both of my requirements from my question:
➜ ~ alias cat='echo hello'
➜ ~ echo goodbye > example.txt
➜ ~ sudo cat
hello
➜ ~ sudo mv example.txt2 example.txt
It also seems that this came up again in 2008 on the mailing list with a solution like so:
alias sudo='noglob do_sudo '
function do_sudo
{
integer glob=1
local -a run
run=( command sudo )
if [[ $# -gt 1 && $1 = -u ]]; then
run+=($1 $2)
shift ; shift
fi
(($# == 0)) && 1=/bin/zsh
while (($#)); do
case "$1" in
command|exec|-) shift; break ;;
nocorrect) shift ;;
noglob) glob=0; shift ;;
*) break ;;
esac
done
if ((glob)); then
PATH="/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH" $run $~==*
else
PATH="/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH" $run $==*
fi
}
Which seems to be doing a lot that I admittedly don't fully understand. This seems to ignore autocorrect (as stated by the author).