Alias command not found when running .bashrc

Question

I'm trying to do the simplest of shell aliases like I always use to do.

Here's my .bashrc (and same happened with ZSH and .zshrc) for instance :

alias ll=“ls -al”
alias edit_http=“open -e /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf”

and here's my $PATH variable :

/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

When I open a new terminal window I get this :

-bash: alias: -al”: not found
-bash: alias: -e: not found
-bash: alias: /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf”: not found

Here's my ls -al result of .bashrc :

-rwxr-xr-x@   1 ed    staff     78 Mar 17 03:55 .bashrc

Strangely I can type this into Terminal and it works :

alias ll="ls -al"

But not from within the .bashrc file.

Any suggestions ? I've checked so many forum entries and nothing worked so far.

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-13 12:36:30Z

4

It looks like something went wrong during copying the alias into your .bashrc.

You ended up with 'wrong' quotation mark. Replace “ with "and it should work. “ is unicode but you require ascii quotation marks. For testing you can use this .bashrc

# bashrc example
# won't work
alias ll=“ls -al”
# will work
alias la="ls -al"

And with this code you can verify your problem:

$ source .bashrc
-bash: alias: -al”: not found
$ ll
-bash: “ls: command not found
$ la
total 0
drwxr-xr-x   2 alneuman  staff    68 Mar 17 12:18 .
drwxrwxrwx+ 70 alneuman  staff  2380 Mar 17 12:18 ..

Have a look here at unix.stackexchange. Somebody had the same issue. Brave new unicode world ;)

edited Apr 13, 2017 at 12:36

CommunityBot

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answered Mar 17, 2016 at 11:15

aleneum

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1 Comment

EdC7 Over a year ago

That was it. Thanks so much! Your post allowed me to see what was happening. I was using "open -e" and TextEdit to edit the .bashrc file and the Substitutions - Smart Quotes was ON. Once I turned it OFF everything worked fine. Success!

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