Recently, a buddy of mine was having some issues with Homebrew after upgrading
to Big Sur. After doing the Googling he could have done on his own, I came to
realize that he needed to manually upgrade to the latest version, that was
compatible with Big Sur.
He said he would, but curl wasn’t working either. When he said that, my first
thought was that he had curl aliased in such a way that was referencing a
version installed by Homebrew.
It’s been a while since I’ve developed on macOS, so I’m not sure if that was the
case, but I still gave him the suggestion to try running the command with a
backslash as to bypass the alias.
Before I get too far into this, if you’re not familiar with aliases, they allow
you to create shortcuts for commands. You can shorten a really-long-command
down to rlc or take a command and always include a bunch of arguments, like I
do with the ls command:
alias ls='gls --color=auto -hF'
One place this comes up for me is that I alias the cat command to the bat
command. bat is a “better” cat as it does syntax highlighting and line
numbers and all of that. But you know, sometimes I don’t want all of that crap,
so when I just want good ol’ cat instead, I’ll run:
cat
And BOOM, I’m running the unaliased cat command.
So that’s pretty much it, if you want to run a command and NOT the alias you
have setup, you can prefix it with backslash and you’re off to the races.
Also, if you happen to be interested in the aliases that I use on a daily basis
to be more productive, you can check them out here.
Be sure to star my dotfiles as I do keep them fairly well maintained 🙂
