Aliasing cat or any other ubiquitous shell utility to a replacement is a mistake. Garuda did this, and it was driving me crazy why cat was giving me errors. Turns out that they had aliased bat to cat, and since bat is a different program, it didn’t work in exactly the same way, and an update had introduced some unexpected behavior.
Drop-in replacements are dumb. Just learn to use a different command.
If you are me, there is no brain space for remembering new commands. I can already barely hold on to few dozens that I use often.
And occasionally when I need “that one that does that niche thing… how was it?” program - I just sit there sifting through logs for couple minutes.
Today it was od (tbh it’s od almost half the time; not really the best name to memorize (I really need to make a note or something, so I stop forgetting it, lol))
Also, for this reason I went to great lengths to keep my ~/.zsh_history protected from being randomly deleted/overwritten by mistake, as it happened a couple of times. Currently it’s sitting at around 30_000 lines, oldest command is 2 years old.
Aliasing
cator any other ubiquitous shell utility to a replacement is a mistake. Garuda did this, and it was driving me crazy whycatwas giving me errors. Turns out that they had aliasedbattocat, and sincebatis a different program, it didn’t work in exactly the same way, and an update had introduced some unexpected behavior.Drop-in replacements are dumb. Just learn to use a different command.
I think it’s ok to add this in a personal
.zshrc, not on a distro level:If it breaks something - I’d probably know why and can easily fix it by removing alias/calling cat directly.
Also, scripts almost always use bash or sh in shebang, not zsh. So it only triggers if I type
catin terminal.It’s better to learn the new command, then it still works when you use a different machine that doesn’t have your alias
If you are me, there is no brain space for remembering new commands. I can already barely hold on to few dozens that I use often. And occasionally when I need “that one that does that niche thing… how was it?” program - I just sit there sifting through logs for couple minutes.
Today it was
od(tbh it’sodalmost half the time; not really the best name to memorize (I really need to make a note or something, so I stop forgetting it, lol))Also, for this reason I went to great lengths to keep my
~/.zsh_historyprotected from being randomly deleted/overwritten by mistake, as it happened a couple of times. Currently it’s sitting at around 30_000 lines, oldest command is 2 years old.Also, even zsh scripts don’t read your .zshrc by default.