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
