Today I Learned

hashrocket A Hashrocket project

Global Alias in zsh

What makes an alias global? Well, the -g flag of course. And what does this globality give you? Well, the ability to invoke an alias anywhere in the command line.

If I like the word 'Potateos' but I don't ever have the energy to type the whole thing then I can create a global alias for that word:

> alias -g PO="Potatoes"
> echo PO
Potatoes

That's convenient and cool. What is it actually for? Maybe redirecting errors to /dev/null:

> alias -g NO='2> /dev/null'
> echo foo >> /dev/stderr
foo
> (echo foo >> /dev/stderr) NO
# no output, it got swallowed!

Looks weird and maybe not useful, but maybe you can creatively find a useful way to use it:

I learned about this zsh functionality and other functionality here.

See More #command-line TILs