Question

$0 expands to the name of the shell script.

$ cat ./sample-script
#!/bin/bash
echo $0
$ chmod 700 ./sample-script
$ ./sample-script
./sample-script

If the shell script is invoked via a symbolic link, $0 expands to its name:

$ ln -s ./sample-script symlinked-script
$ ./symlinked-script
./symlinked-script

How could I get the name of an alias? Here `$0′ expands again to the filename:

$ alias aliased-script=./sample-script
$ aliased-script
./sample-script

Answer 1

I imagine you already know this, but for the record the answer is: you need cooperation by the code implementing the alias.

alternate_name () {
  MY_ALIAS_WAS=alternate_name real_name "$@"
}

or, if you really want to use the superseded alias syntax:

alias alternate_name="MY_ALIAS_WAS=alternate_name real_name"

…and then…

$ cat ~/bin/real_name
#!/bin/sh
echo $0, I was $MY_ALIAS_WAS, "$@"