Primitive Alias doesn't work in Bash

Question

I wrote the following rather primitive alias:

alias unshorten="curl -k -v -I $1 2>&1 | grep -i '< location' | cut -d ' ' -f 3"

It's meant to unshorten the shortened link and then print out the real link without visiting the site itself. But when I try it out with a link it throws out this:

cut: 'https://testlinkhere.com': No such file or directory

What am I doing wrong?

You can't pass a parameter (`$1`) to a bash alias like that - see [How to pass parameters to an alias?](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3773/how-to-pass-parameters-to-an-alias) — steeldriver, Nov 27 '22 at 14:59
you're trying to write a function. So write a function, not an alias. — Marcus Müller, Nov 27 '22 at 15:11
How about `alias unshorten='curl -w "%{redirect_url}\n" -sIo /dev/null'` — Stéphane Chazelas, Nov 27 '22 at 15:27

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 27 '22 at 15:20

0

Thanks to the comments above I rewrote it into a function and it works wonders:

unshorten () {
curl -k -v -I  "$1" 2>&1 | grep -i '< location' | cut -d ' ' -f 3
}

answered Nov 27 '22 at 15:20

Sir Muffington

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Primitive Alias doesn't work in Bash

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