How to execute alias right after sourcing it in a one liner?

Question

I'm trying to write a one liner that sources aliases, then calls one of those newly sourced aliases. My one liner is basically:

alias startEnv sourceAliasFile;runNewAlias

Since I'm using csh, I can't make a function. When I run this, my source executes but my new alias doesn't exist yet and does not execute. Why does this not work and is there a way to get around it?

Answer 1

It doesn't work because the alias definition and use are all on one line. You might work around this by writing the alias definition to a temporary file and sourcing that. But aside from that — you need to have the statements on separate lines (semicolons don't count for the parser in this case).