Comment by cedric simon on "Why I really like fish abbreviations"

Great story.

I also use fish (with cygwin) at work when I need the command line, but there is something that bothers me with abbreviations.
I had an abbreviation that expand php to <path to php5.4>/php but I don't have that binary anymore.

With aliases, I know I could work around that so I can call the "real" command.
But I didn't find how to do so with fish. Google or the official docs (abbr command) didn't help.

It's still a good shell.

Do you mean it's an abbreviation you've set up before and it's lingering? Did you try abbr --erase on it?

If I recall correctly, by default, any abbreviation is set with "universal" scope by default, which means it gets stored in ~/.config/fish/fish_variables, in effect making it "sticky". If that's the case, I imagine you just need to use the --erase option to remove it.

Dave Pearson Yes, I updated to abbreviation since.

But I didn't find a way to call the PHP that is in the path, abbreviation was always kicking in. (because in my case, I need different versions for different tasks)

cedric simon I think I may be misunderstanding the situation then. I was assuming you'd had something like this:

abbr -g php "/usr/local/php/5.4/bin/php"

Is that the sort of thing you mean? If so, given that, what was the problem you actually ran into? I have something similar to the above for a couple of abbreviations and I can't say I'm running into an issue.

Dave Pearson You are right, I have something similar. But I just solved my problem.

What I didn't know, was how to bypass the abbreviation. Let's say I have 2 php version: /usr/local/php/5.4/bin/php and /usr/local/php/7.3/bin/php. Also, php 7.3 is in my $path. I have an abbreviation as php for the version 5.4.

So fish will expand all my php commands with the full path to 5.4 I have set up. But I didn't find how to use the php command in my path because the abbreviation was expanded.
But I just discovered that it's the same as when we use a 'raw' command instead of its alias. Simply by adding a \ before, this will bypass aliases and abbreviations.

So I just can type \php and the php command in my path (the 7.3) will run ;)

cedric simon Ahh! Right, now I understand. Not a situation I've run into so good to know for future reference.

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