Aliases in non-interactive bash

Question

I would like to get aliases to work in non-interactive bash. I run the following command :

bash -c "alias toto=ls; shopt -s expand_aliases; alias toto=ls; toto"

and I get the following :

bash: toto : commande not found

What am I doing wrong ?

Answer 1

From man bash:

Aliases are expanded when a command is read, not when it is executed. Therefore, an alias definition appearing on the same line as another command does not take effect until the next line of input is read.

That means, even in an interactive shell,

alias toto=ls; toto

wouldn't work. There must be a line break between alias definition and call. So,

bash -c 'shopt -s expand_aliases; alias toto=ls
toto'

should work.