Question

I am pretty new to bash, and I want to include an env for bash aliases.. I want to do something like the following

alias foo="bar $(baz)"

So that I could do something like the following

> baz=40
> foo

and foo will expand to the command bar 40. Currently the above does not work because $(baz) is expanded while making the alias. Do I have to wrap this inside a function or something?

Answer 1

You need to use single quotes (') to prevent bash from expanding the variable when creating the alias:

$ alias foo='echo "$bar"'
$ bar="hello"
$ foo
hello