How to have everything following a ZSH alias be placed in the middle of its definition?

Question

I have this file:

/Users/MYUSERNAME/asciidots/asciidots/__main__.py

I want to alias this so that it runs as if it was in my current directory. I was thinking something like this:

alias asciidots="OLDCWD=$PWD && cd /Users/MYUSERNAME/asciidots/asciidots/ && python3 __main__.py ALL_ARGUMENTS_FOLLOWING_THE_ALIAS && cd $OLDCWD"

but I don't know of a way to do this.

Answer 1

Use a function instead:

asciidots() (
    cd /Users/MYUSERNAME/asciidots/asciidots/ &&
    python3 __main__.py "$@"
)

"$@" expands to the arguments to the function, and here I used ( .. ) instead of { .. } around the function body to make it run in a subshell. The subshell environment has a working directory of its own, so hopping back to the original directory afterwards isn't needed.

(That should work in at least Zsh and Bash, if I'm not mistaken.)

See: In Bash, when to alias, when to script, and when to write a function? (the title says Bash, but most of that is likely relevant to Zsh too.)