Print out the alias'd command when using the alias

Question

I am trying to get alias's setup so that they print out the command, then run the command.

Ex:

> alias ls='ls -alh'
> ls
  Running "ls -alh"
  total 1.8G
  drwxr-x--- 36 root   root   4.0K Apr 23 09:44 ./
  drwxr-xr-x 28 root   root   4.0K Mar  6 17:24 ../

Is this possible? I was thinking of using a wrapper function, but I am unsure as to how one would acomplish this.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Just add an echo command in your alias before the actual command:

alias ls='echo "Running ls -alh"; ls -alh'

Answer 2

alias ls='echo "Running ls -alh" && ls -alh'

This runs two commands one after the other. The first command is echo "Running ls -alh", the && checks the return value of the echo command, if that's 0, then the command ls -alh is run. However, if for some reason there is a problem with the echo command and its return value is not 0 then the ls command won't be run.

The && command can come in very handy when writing scripts to run one command only when another is successful.