How do I temporarily bypass an alias in tcsh?

I am using tcsh. bash and zsh and other suggestions won’t help here.

I have several aliases that are named the same thing as another command, so if I did unalias it, typing the same thing would now do something different.

Most of the time I want the aliased command, which is why I have them. However, sometimes I want the unaliased command.

Without actually unaliasing and redefining the command, is there a simple way to tell tcsh to use the unaliased command instead?

For example, vi is aliased to vim, but sometimes I want to just use vi. cd is aliased to change my window title, but sometimes I want to leave it alone.

Obviously I could type /usr/bin/vi but since cd is a shell built-in command, there is no equivalent. Is there a general solution?

Answers:

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Method 1

You can use a backslash:

% alias ls ls -a
% ls
# ls -a output here
% ls
# plain ls output here

For shell builtins, there turns out to be a gotcha: a leading backslash prevents both aliases and builtins from being used, but an internal backslash suppresses aliasing only.

% alias cd pushd
% cd /tmp
/tmp /tmp 
% cd
% dirs
~ /tmp

(I’m tempted to call that another argument against using the csh family of shells.)

Method 2

Don’t make aliases that clobber shell builtins. Your life will be much easier. There are plenty of key combinations left, try cw for your change window title alias 🙂

Edit: Two step solution for fixing alias that aren’t yours:

1. Find the monkey who aliased cd to something other than the change-directory command and request his transfer to the oped column of the local paper. He shouldn’t be holding a job where he can force ideas like that one onto other people’s shells!
2. echo unalias cd >> ~/.bashrc

Method 3

prefix your command with the word ‘command’. Ex.

command ls

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0