Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Escaping aliases

Given how easy it is to create an alias to masquerade as a native command, you should not run aliased commands as a privileged user. We can ignore any aliases currently defined, by escaping the command we want to run. Consider this example:

$ \command

The \ character escapes the command, running it without any aliased changes. When running privileged commands on an untrusted environment, it is always a good security practice to ignore aliases by prefixing the command with \. The attacker might have aliased the privileged command with his/her own custom command, to steal critical information that is provided by the user to the command.