Bash: Spaces in alias name

Question

I am trying to create an aliases in bash. What I want to do is map ls -la to ls -la | more

In my .bashrc file this is what I attempted:

alias 'ls -la'='ls -la | more'

However it does not work because (I assume) it has spaces in the alias name. Is there a work around for this?

Answer 1

ls() { if [[ $@ == "-la" ]]; then command ls -la | more; else command ls "$@"; fi; }

Answer 2

From the alias man page:

The first word of each simple command, if unquoted, is checked to see if it has an alias. If so, that word is replaced by the text of the alias. The alias name and the replacement text may contain any valid shell input, including shell metacharacters, with the exception that the alias name may not contain `='.

So, only the first word is checked for alias matches which makes multi-word aliases impossible. You may be able to write a shell script which checks the arguments and calls your command if they match and otherwise just calls the normal ls (See @Dennis Williamson's answer)

Answer 3

You can invoke this alias still, but you need quotation in order that the space is part of the command word. So "ls -la" -p pattern will pass the -p pattern option to more, not ls.