Noti doesn't expand alias arguments

[simioes]

After installed, i tried with some created alias and it fails. If i run the command assigned to the alias it works as expected.

[variadico]

Could you post more information about this? I wasn't able to reproduce this.

I set this in my ~/.zshrc.

alias n="noti"

Then I ran source ~/.zshrc.

I was able to run n -V alex successfully.

[simioes]

I am not talking about set "noti" as an alias. For example, in osx:

alias speak_hello=' say "hello"'

noti speak_hello give an error. No detailed information, but the command in alias does not run.
Try that.

[variadico]

Ah, yes.

In v2, you now see more information.

Currently, noti assumes utility is an executable in your $PATH. It didn't evaluate your alias. Interestingly, the time command does evaluate aliases, so, yes: this is a bug.

[variadico]

Wait. I just realized time isn't /usr/bin/time in my shell. Running /usr/bin/time speak_hello also results in the same behavior as noti. I'm guessing the reason it worked before was because Zsh knew how to expand the alias when it ran its version of time.

Getting this behavior right seems tricky—and doing it in a way that works across different shells seems even more difficult.

Technically, you can get this to work in bash, version 3.2.57, like this.

shopt -s expand_aliases
alias speak_hello='say "hola"'
noti $(speak_hello)

I'd recommend to avoid doing this though. It seems like most apps can't handle expanding alias arguments.

[variadico]

Hi, @vyasgiridhar, @chmaynard, and @simioes.

I think I might have finally found a solution to this, that's not too crazy. (No regexp.)

cd github.com/variadico/noti/cmd/noti
git fetch --all
git checkout expand-alias
go install

Then try running noti on some shell alias.

noti speak_hello

Can anyone else verify this works? I tried this on macOS Sierra with ZSH. It would be awesome if someone could test on other platforms and shells. ✌️

Thanks!!

[vyasgiridhar]

It works on bash in Arch linux. 👍

[vyasgiridhar]

But can you change

cmd := exec.Command(shell, "-l", "-i", "-c", "which "+a)

to

cmd := exec.Command(shell, "-l", "-i", "-c",a)

would directly spawn the alias process.

[variadico]

Merged the alias change to dev, 1598292.

@vyasgiridhar, I liked your change, but I kept it the way I had it because executing the alias in the subshell caused arguments passed to aliases to be escaped.

$ which findhere 
findhere: aliased to find . -iname
$ noti findhere '*.go' # <- Expanding
$ noti findhere '\*.go' # <- Executing directly

Maybe we can optimize this later.