concatenating aliases in linux shell

Question

I would like to concatenate aliases. So for example, if I have the following:

alias aliasone="cat"
alias aliastwo="/etc/passwd"

I would like to be able to type in the shell something like "aliasone+aliastwo" and then the following command will be executed:

cat /etc/passwd

Can this be done?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Aliases are only for command substitution. If you want to have shorthand for arguments, use shell variables.

file=/etc/passwd
cat "$file"

Answer 2

Simply remove the "alias" from the second line. That is:

alias aliasone="cat"
folder="/etc/passwd"

And then you can write:

aliasone $folder

The problem is that alias evaluate commands; but in the second alias there is no command. In the case of a parameter is better to use a variable. If you have a more particular situation (e.g. you are are inside a script) tell us so we can give a better solution.