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On a Debian 12 machine with bash 5.2.15-2+b7, I had this alias in my .bashrc

alias w3m='/usr/bin/w3m -no-cookie -o auto-image=TRUE '

I understand that aliases are frowned on and should be written as functions, so I wrote

[[ $(type -t w3m) == "w3m" ]] && unalias w3m
w3m() { /usr/bin/w3m -no-cookie -o auto-image=TRUE $@ ; }

and received the error message

bash: .bashrc: line 86: syntax error near unexpected token `('
bash: .bashrc: line 86: `w3m() { /usr/bin/w3m -no-cookie -o auto-image=TRUE $@ ; }'

To fix this, I remove the numeral 3 from w3m, write wm() ... and then the error disappears. But the bash man page says that numerals are allowed in names although it doesn´t say if a name can be a function name:

name A word consisting only of alphanumeric characters and underscores, and
beginning with an alphabetic character or an under‐score.

The man page also says that a function name is an fname (not a name), and says "a function name can be any unquoted shell word that does not contain $".

Nothing in the man page appears to reject w3m so I do not understand why my function name w3m is refused.

Roger

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On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 08:13:15AM -0500, Greg Wooledge wrote:

On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 13:59:37 +0100, Roger Price wrote:

alias w3m='/usr/bin/w3m -no-cookie -o auto-image=TRUE '

w3m() { /usr/bin/w3m -no-cookie -o auto-image=TRUE $@ ; }

and received the error message

bash: .bashrc: line 86: syntax error near unexpected token `('
bash: .bashrc: line 86: `w3m() { /usr/bin/w3m -no-cookie -o auto-image=TRUE $@ ; }'

The problem is you *already* have the alias, and the alias gets expanded
when you try to define the function.

D'oh. This actually only happens with aliases, you are right.
In my other answer I posted some nonsense.

Remember: in things shell (at least), if Greg says something and
me something else, Greg is most probably right :-)

Cheers
--
t

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On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 01:59:37PM +0100, Roger Price wrote:

On a Debian 12 machine with bash 5.2.15-2+b7, I had this alias in my .bashrc

alias w3m='/usr/bin/w3m -no-cookie -o auto-image=TRUE '

I understand that aliases are frowned on and should be written as functions, so
I wrote

Wait a minute...

[[ $(type -t w3m) == "w3m" ]] && unalias w3m
w3m() { /usr/bin/w3m -no-cookie -o auto-image=TRUE $@ ; }

...the problem is that the command w3m exists: the shell
expands that thing and tries to run it -- the parentheses
then are a syntax error.

Thing is, the line as you wrote it is ambiguous whenever the shell
knows how to "run" w3m: shall it run it, or are you trying to define
a function?

The shell decides for the first.

Try prefixing the thing with the builtin `function':

function w3m() ...

Cheers
--
t

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On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 13:59:37 +0100, Roger Price wrote:

alias w3m='/usr/bin/w3m -no-cookie -o auto-image=TRUE '

w3m() { /usr/bin/w3m -no-cookie -o auto-image=TRUE $@ ; }

and received the error message

bash: .bashrc: line 86: syntax error near unexpected token `('
bash: .bashrc: line 86: `w3m() { /usr/bin/w3m -no-cookie -o auto-image=TRUE $@ ; }'

The problem is you *already* have the alias, and the alias gets expanded
when you try to define the function.

hobbit:~$ alias grok=true
hobbit:~$ grok() { echo hi; }
hobbit:~$ grok
hi
hobbit:~$ true
hi

Aliases are insidious like that.

I wrote

[[ $(type -t w3m) == "w3m" ]] && unalias w3m

Well, that doesn't work. I'm not sure what you were going for there,
but that's not what "type -t" says for an alias.

hobbit:~$ type ll
ll is aliased to `ls -l'
hobbit:~$ type -t ll
alias

To answer the question in the Subject header: yes, a function may be
named w3m (without the quotes). Bash allows a stupidly large range
of characters to be used in function names, including forward slashes.

hobbit:~$ /bin/rm() { echo haha; }
hobbit:~$ ls -l badfile
ls: cannot access 'badfile': No such file or directory
hobbit:~$ touch badfile
hobbit:~$ /bin/rm badfile
haha

It's just your alias that was in the way.

Even if you were writing for a pure POSIX sh (not that any such thing
exists in reality), w3m would be a legal function name, because it's
a legal variable name. All legal variable names are also legal function
names under POSIX rules.

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On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 08:18:26AM -0500, Greg Wooledge wrote:

On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 14:10:33 +0100, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:

Try prefixing the thing with the builtin `function':

function w3m() ...

That would still leave the alias in place, though. So, both the alias
and the function would be defined. The alias will win out, I believe,
if you actually try to run w3m at that point.

You need to unalias w3m first. That's the real answer here.

[...]

Yes, indeed. Also, see my other answer to your other post :-)

Cheers
--
t

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* Roger Price <debian@rogerprice.org> [25-01/30=Th 13:59 +0100]:

$wrongCodeForCheckingWhetherAliasExists && unalias w3m

When I want to unalias something that might already be unaliased (as
when it's in .bashrc), I just code
unalias foo 2>/dev/null
because file descriptor 2 is the standard error output.

w3m() { /usr/bin/w3m -no-cookie -o auto-image=TRUE $@ ; }

Speaking of w3m, was anybody part of its dev team long enough
ago to know what happened to it? When I tried to join its
mailing list linked from <https://w3m.sourceforge.net/> I got
no response, even though I tried twice, a few months apart.

w3m needs some serious maintenance. It's still my favorite browser, but
I hear Google is planning to start requiring Javascript for searches,
so somebody's going to have to step up if w3m is to remain viable.

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On Thu, 30 Jan 2025, Greg Wooledge wrote:

You need to unalias w3m first. That's the real answer here.

I wrote

[[ $(type -t w3m) == "w3m" ]] && unalias w3m
w3m() { /usr/bin/w3m -no-cookie -o auto-image=TRUE $@ ; }

which I understood is sufficient to unalias the name w3m before defining the function.

POSIX sh only defines "foo()".
"function foo()" is therefore purely a bash extension.

I stick to the basic definition of Bash functions. Roger

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Roger Price <debian@rogerprice.org> writes:

On a Debian 12 machine with bash 5.2.15-2+b7, I had this alias in my .bashrc

alias w3m='/usr/bin/w3m -no-cookie -o auto-image=TRUE '

I understand that aliases are frowned on and should be written as functions, so
I wrote

[[ $(type -t w3m) == "w3m" ]] && unalias w3m

Shouldn't that be

[[ $(type -t w3m) == "alias" ]] && unalias w3m

?

w3m() { /usr/bin/w3m -no-cookie -o auto-image=TRUE $@ ; }

and received the error message

bash: .bashrc: line 86: syntax error near unexpected token `('
bash: .bashrc: line 86: `w3m() { /usr/bin/w3m -no-cookie -o auto-image=TRUE $@ ; }'

To fix this, I remove the numeral 3 from w3m, write wm() ... and then the error
disappears. But the bash man page says that numerals are allowed in names although it doesn´t say if a name can be a function name:

name A word consisting only of alphanumeric characters and underscores, and
beginning with an alphabetic character or an under‐score.

The man page also says that a function name is an fname (not a name), and says
"a function name can be any unquoted shell word that does not contain $".

Nothing in the man page appears to reject w3m so I do not understand why my function name w3m is refused.

Roger

--
This signature is currently under constuction.

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This is an OpenPGP/MIME signed message (RFC 4880 and 3156)
On 2025-01-30 at 08:52, Will Mengarini wrote:

w3m needs some serious maintenance. It's still my favorite browser,
but I hear Google is planning to start requiring Javascript for
searches, so somebody's going to have to step up if w3m is to remain
viable.

Planning to? They already have - except that they have a whitelist of
browsers they recognize as not supporting JS at all, and they serve
search results (with different formatting) to those browsers anyway.
They could of course be planning to drop that whitelist too, but so far
I at least haven't heard any reports about that.

If you spoof your User-Agent string to google.com as being for e.g.
lynx, you can get those no-JS search-results pages even in Firefox. It's
just only arguably worth it.

On one of my computers, I've jumped through the needed hoops to set
things up (with a browser extension) to spoof the UA for google.com and
nowhere else. On another, I've switched search-engine defaults from
Google to (the HTML-only version of) DuckDuckGo. So far neither is
giving me such an obviously superior experience for me to decide to
switch the other machine over so they both match.

--
The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw


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On Thu, 30 Jan 2025, Loris Bennett wrote:

Roger Price <debian@rogerprice.org> writes:

[[ $(type -t w3m) == "w3m" ]] && unalias w3m

Shouldn't that be

[[ $(type -t w3m) == "alias" ]] && unalias w3m

You are right! From the Bash man page:

type [-aftpP] name [name ...]
With no options, indicate how each name would be interpreted
if used as a command name. If the -t option is used, type
prints a string which is one of alias, keyword, function, builtin,
or file if name is an alias, shell reserved word, function,
builtin, or disk file, respectively.

I made the change and function w3m now works correctly. Thanks.

Roger

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On 1/30/25 8:15 AM, The Wanderer wrote:

On 2025-01-30 at 08:52, Will Mengarini wrote:

w3m needs some serious maintenance. It's still my favorite browser,
but I hear Google is planning to start requiring Javascript for
searches, so somebody's going to have to step up if w3m is to remain
viable.

Planning to? They already have - except that they have a whitelist of browsers they recognize as not supporting JS at all, and they serve
search results (with different formatting) to those browsers anyway.
They could of course be planning to drop that whitelist too, but so far
I at least haven't heard any reports about that.

If you spoof your User-Agent string to google.com as being for e.g.
lynx, you can get those no-JS search-results pages even in Firefox. It's
just only arguably worth it.

On one of my computers, I've jumped through the needed hoops to set
things up (with a browser extension) to spoof the UA for google.com and nowhere else. On another, I've switched search-engine defaults from
Google to (the HTML-only version of) DuckDuckGo. So far neither is
giving me such an obviously superior experience for me to decide to
switch the other machine over so they both match.

I long ago set my default search engine to duckduckgo.com .
No regrets!

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On Thu 30 Jan 2025 at 05:52:02 (-0800), Will Mengarini wrote:

* Roger Price <debian@rogerprice.org> [25-01/30=Th 13:59 +0100]:

$wrongCodeForCheckingWhetherAliasExists && unalias w3m

When I want to unalias something that might already be unaliased (as
when it's in .bashrc), I just code
unalias foo 2>/dev/null
because file descriptor 2 is the standard error output.

Add || true to avoid a non-zero exit status.

Cheers,
David.

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On Thursday 30 January 2025 10:13:39 am Richard Owlett wrote:

On another, I've switched search-engine defaults from
Google to (the HTML-only version of) DuckDuckGo. So far neither is
giving me such an obviously superior experience for me to decide to
switch the other machine over so they both match.

I long ago set my default search engine to duckduckgo.com .
No regrets!

Same here...

--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space,  a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed.  --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

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