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).

Answer 1

A bit late to the party, but I was having the same problem (trying to find where the "l." command was aliased in RHEL6), and ended up in a place not mentioned in the previous answers. It may not be found in all bash implementations, but if the /etc/profile.d/ directory exists, try grepping there for unexplained aliases. That's where I found:

[user@server ~]$ grep l\\. /etc/profile.d/*
/etc/profile.d/colorls.csh:alias l. 'ls -d .*'
/etc/profile.d/colorls.csh:alias l. 'ls -d .* --color=auto'
/etc/profile.d/colorls.sh:  alias l.='ls -d .*' 2>/dev/null
/etc/profile.d/colorls.sh:alias l.='ls -d .* --color=auto' 2>/dev/null

The directory isn't mentioned in the bash manpage, and isn't properly part of where bash searches for profile/startup info, but in the case of RHEL you can see the calling code within /etc/profile:

for i in /etc/profile.d/*.sh ; do
  if [ -r "$i" ]; then
    if [ "${-#*i}" != "$-" ]; then
      . "$i"
    else
      . "$i" >/dev/null 2>&1
    fi
  fi
done

Answer 2

For more complex setups (e.g. when you're using a shell script framework like bash-it, oh-my-zsh or the likes) it's often useful to add 'alias mysql' at key positions in your scripts. This will help you figure out exactly when the alias is added.

e.g.:

echo "before sourcing .bash-it:"
alias mysql
. $HOME/.bash-it/bash-it.sh
echo "after sourcing bash:"
alias mysql

Answer 3

Also in future these are the standard bash config files

• /etc/profile
• ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login or ~/.profile
• ~/.bash_logout
• ~/.bashrc

More info: http://www.heimhardt.com/htdocs/bashrcs.html

Answer 4

I found the answer ( I had been staring at the correct file but missed the obvious ).

The aliases in my case are defined in the file ~/.bash_profile

Somehow this eluded me.

Answer 5

I think that maybe this is similar to what ghostdog74 meant however their command didn't work for me.

I would try something like this:

for i in `find . -type f`; do   # find all files in/under current dir
echo "========" 
echo $i                         # print file name
cat $i | grep "alias"           # find if it has alias and if it does print the line containing it
done

If you wanted to be really fancy you could even add an if [[ grep -c "alias" ]] then <print file name>

Answer 6

Try: alias | grep name_of_alias Ex.: alias | grep mysql

or, as already mentioned above

which name_of_alias