Passing argument to alias in bash [duplicate]

Question

Is it possible to do the following:

I want to run the following:

mongodb bin/mongod 

In my bash_profile I have

alias = "./path/to/mongodb/$1" 

Answer 1

An alias will expand to the string it represents. Anything after the alias will appear after its expansion without needing to be or able to be passed as explicit arguments (e.g. $1).

$ alias foo='/path/to/bar' $ foo some args 

will get expanded to

$ /path/to/bar some args 

If you want to use explicit arguments, you'll need to use a function

$ foo () { /path/to/bar "$@" fixed args; } $ foo abc 123 

will be executed as if you had done

$ /path/to/bar abc 123 fixed args 

To undefine an alias:

unalias foo 

To undefine a function:

unset -f foo 

To see the type and definition (for each defined alias, keyword, function, builtin or executable file):

type -a foo 

Or type only (for the highest precedence occurrence):

type -t foo 

Answer 2

Usually when I want to pass arguments to an alias in Bash, I use a combination of an alias and a function like this, for instance:

function __t2d {                                                                          if [ "$1x" != 'x' ]; then                                                           date -d "@$1"                                                                 fi                                                                      }   alias t2d='__t2d'