alias problem

[Hiro]

Being a lazy typist i tend to use alias quite a lot but there is one alias i wish to set that i cannot get to work. I often forget to sudo a command so i end up using sudo !! but am unable to set up an alias for this.
When i type

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alias sud="sudo !!"

I get the reply

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alias sud="sudo alias"

and sud is set to "sudo alias" which strangely gives a command not found error, as does typing "sudo alias" in the terminal which seems strange.
Has anyone managed this or am i the only one forgetful enough to need it?
Cheers, Hiro.

[Joe Schmoe]

I think it will work if you use single quotes instead of double quotes.

Because in bash, ! is not special inside of single quotes (which is sensible) - unlike (t)csh where it is always special unless escaped (with \).

[Hiro]

Thanks for the reply Joe but that doesn't seem to work either, alias now looks good

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alias sud='sudo !!'

However the error i get is

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sudo: !! command not found

I know a (very) tiny bit about escape characters and had already tried:

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 alias sud="sudo\!!"   
 alias sud="sudo \!!"

Have now tried same code but with single quotes but that didn't work either, possibly as my use of escape characters is wrong?
Also, i was trying over ssh and wondered about dodgy character recognition on the Windows machine i was using so i fired up the monitor and tried that but still no joy.
It's not the end of the world if i can't get it to work but i do hate being beaten.

[jojopi]

History expansion does not take place on the results of alias expansion. So any "!"s in the alias are either expanded when the alias is set, or taken literally when the alias is used.

The only way around it is to avoid syntactical history expansion and instead use the built-in "history" command to obtain the previous command:

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alias sud='sudo $(history -p !!)'

Unfortunately, this loses any quoting that was present in the command, so commands with quotes will not repeat correctly:

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pi@tau ~ $ alias sud='sudo $(history -p !!)'
pi@tau ~ $ echo hello
hello
pi@tau ~ $ sud
hello
pi@tau ~ $ python -c 'print "hello"'
hello
pi@tau ~ $ sud
  File "<string>", line 1
    'print
         ^
SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal

Incidentally, the reason that "sudo alias" does not work is that alias is a shell built-in, and there is no external program "alias" that sudo could run with elevated privileges. (And even if there was, the alias would not affect your existing shell.)

It is also worth mentioning that a pipeline "A |B" repeated with "sudo !!" gives "sudo A |B", which runs A with privilege and B without, which may or may not be useful. Similarly a list command "A && B". And a compound command like "(A)" is not even syntactically correct when preceded by sudo. Redirections "A >FILE" are another case that cause confusion, because the redirection is set up by the shell before sudo even starts.

For all these reasons, it is extremely difficult to automate the desired effect of "repeat the last command as if it had been executed by a privileged user". You really need to understand the issues and consider the actual command to decide whether "sudo !!" will do or not. A naïve alias will hide this subtlety and work in even fewer cases, so I do not think it is well advised.

[sdjf]

When i type

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alias sud="sudo !!"

I get the reply

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alias sud="sudo alias"

and sud is set to "sudo alias" which strangely gives a command not found error, as does typing "sudo alias" in the terminal which seems strange.

As someone else has mentioned, alias is not a command, so it makes perfect sense that entering "sudo alias" or "sud alias" would give you a "command not found" error. aliasing is a bash "built-in".

But the use of !! is a new one on me, have never seen that before. Is it a more recent addition to command line tools? I know about tab expansion, but enter a real tab when I want to use it.

[Hiro]

@jojopi That code works well for me, it is only for when i do something daft like type out a long command, for example mounting a network drive without remembering the sudo. I know that sudo !! is only 7 keystrokes but like i said i'm a lazy typist. Incidentally the other route of up-cursor, home and then sudo and space is also 7 keystrokes:).

I had never heard of built-ins before so had to have a quick google and learnt a lot. I found a full list of bash built-ins (there aren't really that many) and did indeed discover that you cannot sudo any of them. I also managed to find out that;

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type alias

will inform me if alias (or insert any other command after type) is built-in or not.

It's always nice to learn something new so thanks for all your help,Hiro.