how to expand aliases inline in bash?

Question

Is there a way to expand aliases inline in bash?

$bash>alias ll='ls -l '
$bash>ll<tab>
$bash>ls -l 

Answer 1

You can press Ctrl-Alt-e to perform the readline function shell-expand-line which will do alias, history and word expansions. Note that on some keyboards Meta is not Alt. You might need to press Esc then Ctrl-e

The functions alias-expand-line and history-and-alias-expand-line are not bound by default, but you can bind them by adding lines similar to the following to your ~/.inputrc file.

"\e\C-l": alias-expand-line

which would make Ctrl-Alt-l (lower case "ell") perform only alias expansion.

Answer 2

This does not work. But I'm guessing/hoping something like this can be done to do what you want to do. You would have to use your own completion script. This is how you make one:

_ll()
{
     COMPREPLY=(ls -l)
     #The next line does not work. I just hope there were a way to replace that word
     COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1]="ls -l"
}
complete -F _ll ll

Now source the full bash_completion file(http://caliban.org/bash) and put the above mentioned script in a file inside bash_completion.d directory that the script you get from the url references. Let me know if it doesn't work.

Thanks.