[SunRescue] Aliases in Solaris 7

[Maarten Deen]

Hi,

ISTR someone asking about setting up aliases in Solaris. I 
responded to that saying it was easy (just use 'alias').
I was under the impression that it worked too, but it seems not to. 
Recently I noticed that the very basic alias I use (ls -F) did not 
work. So I set out to investigate:

I use bash as login shell on Solaris 7. When I put the command 
alias ls='ls -F' in .bash_login and telnet to the machine, nothing 
happens. I remembered that alias is a builtin command in bash, 
but 'which alias' gave me a /usr/bin/alias. Hmm. When executing 
/usr/bin/alias on the commandline, all was well, but apparently 
/usr/bin/alias it does not work from with .bash_login.
I renamed /usr/bin/alias to /usr/bin/alias.old and all was well. bash 
now uses it's builtin alias and I'm happy.

CDE is a different story. I had an alias command in .dtprofile, but 
that does not work either. I tried putting my renamed alias in it, and 
Solaris went berserk. I managed to notice a blank screen, the disk 
seeks and ps gave me 100's of alias.old processes running. After 
that, it couldn't fork any processes. Luckily I had a root session 
logged in, and shutdown was my friend.
.dtprofile has an option to run .login/.profile 
(DTSOURCEPROFILE=true), but that hasn't worked yet.

Any hints?

My belief now: /usr/bin/alias is broken and should be moved if you 
have a better option

Maarten


--
Maarten Deen                                           +31 (0)77 3076879
mdeen at xs4all.nl                              http://www.xs4all.nl/~mdeen