I keep hearing from new users who are used to bash-style aliases, how frustrating it is not to be able to create aliases with parameters, the way you can in bash …
I’m going to show you how to make the “alias” command work roughly the way it does in bash, but first, let me clear this up:
| Bash or Csh | PowerShell |
|---|---|
| script | script |
| alias, shell functions | function |
| ... | alias |
In Bash, the recommendation is that “for almost every purpose, shell functions are preferred over aliases” ... and that recommendation is even stronger for PowerShell. The PowerShell “alias” is a true alias — it’s just another name for a command, script, function, etc. and it doesn’t support passing parameters or making mini-scripts at all.
Usually, an alias serves to give you a name you can remember, but sometimes it’s just to shorten the name, . Another use for them is to let you specify the default cmdlet — if you have two cmdlets (or script functions) with the same name, you can use an alias to override which one is executed by default.
The PowerShell function can do everything a bash alias can do (and everything a function or script can do, but this isn’t a tip about that, it’s a tip about making an alias and unalias command that works the way you expect it to). So …
## Aliases.ps1 -- to be dot-sourced from your profile
if($Host.Version.Major -ge 2) {
function script:Resolve-Aliases
{
param($line)
[System.Management.Automation.PSParser]::Tokenize($line,[ref]$null) | % {
if($_.Type -eq "Command") {
$cmd = @(which $_.Content)[0]
if($cmd.CommandType -eq "Alias") {
$line = $line.Remove( $_.StartColumn -1, $_.Length ).Insert( $_.StartColumn -1, $cmd.Definition )
}
}
}
$line
}
}
function alias {
# pull together all the args and then split on =
$alias,$cmd = [string]::join(" ",$args).split("=",2) | % { $_.trim()}
if($Host.Version.Major -ge 2) {
$cmd = Resolve-Aliases $cmd
}
New-Item -Path function: -Name "Global:Alias$Alias" -Options "AllScope" -Value @"
Invoke-Expression '$cmd `$args'
###ALIAS###
"@
Set-Alias -Name $Alias -Value "Alias$Alias" -Description "A UNIX-style alias using functions" -Option "AllScope" -scope Global -passThru
}
function unalias([string]$Alias,[switch]$Force){
if( (Get-Alias $Alias).Description -eq "A UNIX-style alias using functions" ) {
Remove-Item "function:Alias$Alias" -Force:$Force
Remove-Item "alias:$alias" -Force:$Force
if($?) {
"Removed alias '$Alias' and accompanying function"
}
} else {
Remove-Item "alias:$alias" -Force:$Force
if($?) {
"Removed alias '$Alias'"
}
}
}
You can save that as alias.ps1 and create your aliases the way you used to in bash alias ls='ls -recurse' and still be able to invoke them and, you can pass them extra parameters somewhat like in csh when you invoke them. I’ve added some extra text in the function name and content and in the alias description, so it’s actually pretty easy to find all the aliases and functions this script creates and dump them to a file so you can reload them later if you want … but I haven’t actually written a function to do that yet myself.
One important note: You must not use recursive aliases in the bindings on v1 — that is, alias ls='ls -recurse' will loop until it hits PowerShell’s recursive limit (only 100) and exit if you try to use it on v1 — because the script won’t be able to resolve the alias “ls” to Get-ChildItem … you’re probably better off not relying on that feature anyway.