aliasing cd and ls

[pareshverma91]

the problem is that i want to alias my cd cmd in such a way that whensover i enter any directory, a ls cmd i automatically performed.
i tried ' alias cd='cd $1;ls' , but it is not working.
please help...

[scathefire]

i do believe you have to call it something else, you can't alias an actual command that exists. so you can't do what you are doing, but this would work:

alias lmao='cd $1;ls'

lmao /home

[Rubberman]

i do believe you have to call it something else, you can't alias an actual command that exists. so you can't do what you are doing, but this would work:

alias lmao='cd $1;ls'

lmao /home

I've done some playing. The solution above won't work either. It seems that the aliased command will ignore the argument for all but the last item on the command line, so effectively what the alias does is this:

cd ; ls

Returning you to your home directory.

If you were to do this:

alias cd='ls $1 ; cd $1'

then the command cd somedirectory would list your current directory, but leave you in the one specified. IE, it behaves like you did this:

ls ; cd somedirectory

The upshot of all this is that I don't think you can do what you want. Some may call this a bash bug, and others might just shrug and say "it has always been that way"...

However, there IS a solution, though you can't use the name 'cd' - create a shell procedure, call it tcd, in your ~/.bashrc file. It would be defined like this:

tcd() {
cd $1
ls
}
alias cd='tcd $1'

Note that you can then alias the function tcd() to cd and it will work like you want! You can't use 'cd' for the function name directly. If you do that, you end up with an endlessly recursing function - CRASH!

[scathefire]

the aliasing i talked about worked fine on one of my centos servers. but here is the thing, once you log out the alias disappears (only good for one session). in order to make it permanent, you'd have to add it to the user's bashrc. system-wide aliases must be added to /etc/bashrc and require a restart

[Lazydog]

scathefire's alias worked on my system with out issues. One thing you can do is add the alias that was given by scathefire amd then add another alias for cd that points to what ever you called the first alias. Some thing like;

alias lmao='cd $1;ls'
alias cd=lmao

Now when you use the cd command you get the effect you are looking for.

[Cabhan]

scathefire's alias does not work for me (Ubuntu 9.10). Rubberman's solution does, but it can be simplified even further:

function cd() {
    builtin cd "$1"
    ls
}

The "builtin" command was designed for exactly this purpose: it allows you to access a shell builtin even if the command itself has been redefined. As you can see, this allows you to avoid using an alias.