Using alias of path in commands?

alias is for aliasing commands. If you want to “alias“ arguments, use shell/environment variables.

$ docs=/media/docs
$ cd $docs

You might find a symbolic link useful. For example

ln -s /media/docs ~/docs

Now you'll have a "folder" in your home directory named "docs" that points to "/media/docs". You can use that path with commands like mv or cp.

These commands now both move "myfile" to the same location

mv myfile ~/docs
mv myfile /media/docs

It might be excessive for your purposes but an alternative may be to use zoxide. It learns the directories you use regularly and you can then cd to those directories through the z command. E.g. z docs.

As already pointed out in other comments here, alias is used specifically to define a new shell command and in order to define some arbitrary text substitution to be used anywhere in a commandline you'll need to use a variable instead, but for the specific case of cd there's also a feature called CDPATH that you might be interested in learning about:

https://writesoftwarewell.com/cdpath-easily-navigate-directories-in-the-terminal

You should be using a variable not an alias.

Variables in bash have a few sharp edges; one of which is that spaces act as a delimiter and turn the variable into a list.

The other being that sometimes escaping and unescaping the contents of a variable can be stupidly tricky. This is why a lot of people who use bash do not like spaces in directory or file names.

By default bash will only expand an alias if it's the first argument of the command (that is, the command itself).

It's probably not intended to use aliases this way, and there are probably better options for you.

However, there is a little trick you can do. If the alias command ends in a space, then bash will also check the next argument:

alias cd='cd '

Notice the trailing space after 'cd' in the alias definition.

alias docs='/media/docs'

then, cd docs should work the way you expect.

Another method would be to:

alias docs='echo /media/docs'

Then you can do

cd `docs`  

The backticks will cause the shell to replace that portion with the output of the docs shell command, which will be expanded via the alias.

All that said, it's probably easiest just to use a link, like another commenter suggested.

This is a bad idea for a number of reasons. Instead, if you move files to a specific location frequently, you want to make a symbolic link to that location instead. It acts as a circuit breaker in case something about your environment changes or breaks.

You might consider looking into other shells. Fish has things such as nor requiring escaping variables with spaces and defining abbreviations that can work anywhere in a command line.

May I interest you in the “ln” command?

Usually if you wanna access a file (or a directory, that’s a file too!) from some place other than where it is in the filesystem you make a link using ln like “ln /mnt/target link_name”. Which would give you a link type file (that shows up as a link when you give -l to ls) called “link_name” which references “/mnt/target” when you try to do something to it (Like ls!).

as others pointed out alias is not right for this but also /media would be its own root dir idk if this is on purpose or if you meant ~/media