Using alias of path in commands? (piefed.social)

submitted 2 days ago by MolochHorridus@piefed.social to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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This is probably a very simple thing but I can’t find an answer, possibly because I don’t know what terms to use in search.

How do I use an alias of a path with mv or cp? Or even cd?

In /etc/bash.bashrc I have: alias docs=‘/media/docs

cd docs Gives “No such file or directory”

Yet: docs Gives “Is directory”

With alias docs=‘cd /media/docs’ and by typing docs I get into the directory. Obviously I can’t use that alias with mv or cp though.

Maybe this isn’t even an intended use of alias but still. Why doesn’t it work?

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[-] darklamer@feddit.org 6 points 1 day ago

As already pointed out in other comments here, alias is used specifically to define a new shell command and in order to define some arbitrary text substitution to be used anywhere in a commandline you'll need to use a variable instead, but for the specific case of cd there's also a feature called CDPATH that you might be interested in learning about:

https://writesoftwarewell.com/cdpath-easily-navigate-directories-in-the-terminal

this post was submitted on 17 May 2026

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