Alias in bash not working [closed]

Question

alias bp="cat $@ > [email protected]"

My second idea was:

alias bp="cp $@{,.BACK}"

So i want to have a command to backup a file. It does not raise any error but it simply doesn't work.

Answer 1

Aliases are purely a textual replacement. If you want to use or manipulate the arguments, you need to create a function:

bp () {
  for file; do 
      cp -i "$file" "$file".BACK
  done
}