How to find out where alias (in the bash sense) is defined when running Terminal in Mac OS X

Question

How can I find out where an alias is defined on my system? I am referring to the kind of alias that is used within a Terminal session launched from Mac OS X (10.6.3).

For example, if I enter the alias command with no parameters at a Terminal command prompt, I get a list of aliases that I have set, for example:

alias mysql='/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql' 

However, I have searched all over my system using Spotlight and mdfind in various startup files and so far can not find where this alias has been defined. ( I did it a long time ago and didn't write down where I assigned the alias).

Answer 1

For OSX, this 2-step sequence worked well for me, in locating an alias I'd created long ago and couldn't locate in expected place (~/.zshrc).

cweekly:~ $ which la la: aliased to ls -lAh  cweekly:~$ grep -r ' ls -lAh' ~ /Users/cweekly//.oh-my-zsh/lib/aliases.zsh:alias la='ls -lAh' 

Aha! "Hiding" in ~/.oh-my-zsh/lib/aliases.zsh. I had poked around a bit in .oh-my-zsh but had overlooked lib/aliases.zsh.

Answer 2

you can just simply type in alias on the command prompt to see what aliases you have. Otherwise, you can do a find on the most common places where aliases are defined, eg

grep -RHi "alias" /etc /root