Dear Shane,

Thanks for your suggestion, it makes sense. I maybe need to explore it a bit further, but so far I’ve not had much success. Trying this in the shell where these aliases did not work:

$ shopt | grep aliases
expand_aliases  on

On top of that, aliases that are defined in ~/.bashrc are actually working in all situations

I tried explicitly stating:

$ shopt -s expand_alisases

either in the shell or in /etc/profile, that didn’t work.

I also tried to move alias definitions in /etc/bashrc, to no avail.

I look at all the different shopt options, and there are two that are differently set in the shells where it works/doesn’t work are 

extglob
hostcomplete

But I don’t see how these might make a difference. I anyway tried to set them on/off explicitly in ~/etc/profile, but that didn’t work either.

I also tried to find a comprehensive guide of what happens when one logs in (which files are read, in what order, etc) but didn’t really got anything satisfying. Anyone who has a good suggestion?

Cheers,

Lionel



> On 26 Jan 2017, at 13:16 , Shane Voss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Dear Lionel,
> 
>> I have aliases defined in .sh files in my /etc/profile.d/ folder. When I log in on my computer directly in either KDE or Gnome, in any terminal (I tried Konsole, x-term and a few others), these aliases are not working (not set, I assume). Other commands in the same .sh files (like additions to $PATH) work fine.
>> 
>> When I log in with the same user through ssh, or directly on the computer on a text console (I don’t know how these are called: you access them through alt+ctrl+2 for example), or with another user in Gnome or KDE, the aliases work again.
> 
> The  man  page for bash says:
> 
>       Aliases  are not expanded when the shell is not interactive, unless the
>       expand_aliases shell option is set using shopt (see the description  of
>       shopt under SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS below).
> 
> It looks to me as if some of your shells do not think they are interactive.
> 
>   Shane
> -- 
> Shane Voss, Computing Officer, School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh
> 
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
> 

--
Lionel Guy 
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