Are there alternatives to alias I'm not aware of?

Question

Today I started to notice weird behavior running a local command for a binary installed through Go. It seems the command is aliased, but consulting alias, it isn't.

The command buf somehow executes cp!

buf --help
Usage: cp [OPTION]... [-T] SOURCE DEST
  or:  cp [OPTION]... SOURCE... DIRECTORY
  or:  cp [OPTION]... -t DIRECTORY SOURCE...
Copy SOURCE to DEST, or multiple SOURCE(s) to DIRECTORY.

Bash setup

GNU bash, version 5.2.15(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) on Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm).

I use Oh My Bash for fancy stuff with auto-updates enabled. This is my .bashrc:

case $- in
  *i*) ;;
    *) return;;
esac

export OSH='/home/tim/.oh-my-bash'

OSH_THEME="font"

completions=(
  git
  ssh
  go
  docker
  docker-compose
  makefile
)

aliases=(
  general
)

plugins=(
  git
  bashmarks
)

source "$OSH"/oh-my-bash.sh

export PATH="$PATH:/home/tim/.local/bin"

eval $(thefuck --alias)

export BUN_INSTALL="$HOME/.bun"
export PATH=$BUN_INSTALL/bin:$PATH

Failing command

The command was installed in GOPATH using the go command:

go install github.com/bufbuild/buf/cmd/[email protected]

GOPATH:

go env GOPATH
/home/tim/go

And the Go bin directory is part of PATH:

echo $PATH
/home/tim/.bun/bin:/home/tim/go/bin:/home/tim/Repositories/goroot/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games:/home/tim/.local/bin:/home/tim/.local/bin

And a sanity check with which resolves to the correct binary:

which buf
/home/tim/go/bin/buf

Executing the path directly works as expected:

/home/tim/go/bin/buf --help
The Buf CLI
...

Configured Aliases

There is no configured alias for buf:

alias buf
bash: alias: buf: not found

Other notes

I've installed Debian just a few months ago. I'm not sure if I ever tried to run buf directly after that. However, my home directory was restored from a backup created from OpenSUSE, on which I'm sure I've run the buf command successfully. Oh My Bash, the Go installation and go binaries were both part of that backup. Most stuff did get updated meanwhile, but I don't remember changing any config.

Other Go binaries work as expected:

cobra-cli --help
Cobra is a CLI library for Go that empowers applications.

For my daily work buf is also used, but through a MakeFile. When invoked through make it runs just fine.

How can the buf command executed cp when I can't find an alias and the PATH is the correct one? Are there other ways of aliasing commands I'm not aware of?

Answer 1

As noted in the comments, use type buf to ask the shell what it thinks buf is. In this case, I'd expect you'll find that it is indeed a function as also suggested in the comments - in particular, this function from oh-my-bash:

#   buf:  back up file with timestamp
#   ---------------------------------------------------------
function buf {
  local filename filetime
  filename=$1
  filetime=$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)
  cp -a "${filename}" "${filename}_${filetime}"
}