access shell alias with dmenu

Question

I have a collection of bash commands (one liners) that I use on a regular basis to open new shells or start programs with a given set of arguments. As I use dmenu, I'd like to be able to use those commands from my shell and from dmenu. So defining an alias in my .bashrc isn't enough, I have to put these commands in a dedicated file. The file needs then to be executable and stored in a $PATH known to dmenu. If I do so, the alias becomes useless because the shell will find the executable. But that means I have to create one file per command. It's annoying.

Is there a way to store all those commands in one file (or at least in a more convenient way) so that they can be accessed via shell and dmenu? Maybe something like an alias file read by dmenu...

Answer 1

If you have all your aliases in a single file (let's say ~/.aliases.sh), you could do something like this:

#!/bin/bash . ~/.aliases.sh alias | awk -F '[ =]' '{print $2}' | dmenu | xargs -ICMD bash -O expand_aliases -c $'. aliases.sh\nCMD' 

Answer 2

You will have to write a script to pipe them into dmenu and execute the result.

this is a example script

#!/bin/bash cachedir=${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-"$HOME/.cache"} if [ -d "$cachedir" ]; then cache=$cachedir/dmenu_run else cache=$HOME/.dmenu_cache # if no xdg dir, fall back to dotfile in ~ fi if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then aliases=( ~/.bash_aliases ) fi if [ ~/.bash_functions ]; then functions=( ~/.bash_functions ) fi source $aliases cmd=`( IFS=: if stest -dqr -n "$cache" $PATH || stest -fqr -n "$cache" "$aliases" || stest -fqr -n "$cache" "$functions"; then ( stest -flx $PATH alias | awk -F '[ =]' '{print $2}' compgen -A function ) | sort -u | tee "$cache" | dmenu "$@" else dmenu "$@" < "$cache" fi )` if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then if [ ! -z "$(grep '^alias' $aliases|cut -d'=' -f1|grep $cmd)" ] || [ -z $(which $cmd) ]; then echo -e "source ~/.bash_aliases \n $cmd" | bash -O expand_aliases & else exec $cmd & fi fi 

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