In another script I’ve been working on lately I wanted to call 'mysql' but unfortunately on my machine it’s 'mysql5' rather than 'mysql'.

I have an alias defined in '~/.bash_profile' so I can call 'mysql' from the terminal whenever I want to.

Unfortunately shell scripts don’t seem to have access to this alias and the only suggestion I’ve come across while googling this is to source '~/.bash_profile' inside the script.

Since others are going to use the script and might have '~/.bashrc' instead of '~/.bash_profile' I didn’t really want to go down that route.

At this stage a colleague of mine came up with the idea of creating a soft link from mysql to mysql5 inside a folder which is already added to the path.

We located mysql5…​

…​and then created a soft link like so:

And it works!

Of course t’is pure hackery so I’d be interested if anyone knows a better way of getting around this.