Re: in bash 4.4.12,want to verify a behavior...

[Dennis Williamson]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 10:46 PM L A Walsh <bash@tlinx.org wrote:

>
> I printed the various declares using:
>
> declare -p |& more
>
> One of the early entries is:
>
> declare -A BASH_ALIASES=()
>
> Yet if I type 'alias |& wc, I see 56 lines starting with alias.
>
> I _thought_ BASH_ALIASES was suppose to hold the aliases
> and for an "alias whence='type -a'", I should see something like
> declare -A BASH_ALIASES=([whence]='type -a ...) instead of
> the empty assignment above.
>
> Am I misunderstanding or missing something?
>
> I'm assuming ("guessing?") that other people see
> their aliases in
> BASH_ALIASES?
>
> Am trying to figure out where I should start looking for why
> this isn't set, but wanted to make sure my understanding of
> of this feature was correct.
>
> Thanks!
> -linda
>
>
>
>

It's likely that somewhere your BASH_ALIASES has been unset. See the manual
section quoted here:

BASH_ALIASES

An associative array variable whose members correspond to the internal list
of aliases as maintained by the alias builtin. (see Bourne Shell Builtins
<https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Bourne-Shell-Builtins>).
Elements added to this array appear in the alias list; however, unsetting
array elements currently does not cause aliases to be removed from the
alias list. If BASH_ALIASES is unset, it loses its special properties, even
if it is subsequently reset.

>