An alias is expanded simply by replacing the alias by its definition (as a list of tokens, not a string, which is basically equivalent to taking the string and adding a space at the end). So stopdev; true is expanded to
cd $HOME/website; make website_stop; make backend_stop; ; true
^^^
Since you can't have two consecutive semicolons in the shell syntax, that's a syntax error.
You can remove the ;, and that will make stopdev; startev work, but it isn't good, because any argument you pass to stopdev will be passed to make backend_stop, which is probably not desirable.
You should make this a function. Also, don't run the make commands if the cd command fails.
stopdev () {
cd "$HOME/website" && {
make website_stop
make backend_stop
}
}
An improvement would be to make the function return a failure code even if make website_stop fails but make backend_stop succeeds.
stopdev () {
cd "$HOME/website" && {
make website_stop
ret=$?
make backend_stop ||&& return $ret
}
}
Note that this leaves you in the ~/website directory. To avoid changing the directory of the shell process, run the function in a subshell.
stopdev () (
cd "$HOME/website" && {
make website_stop
ret=$?
make backend_stop && return $ret
}
)
Alternatively, with GNU make, you can use its -C option.
stopdev () {
make -C "$HOME/website" website_stop
ret=$?
make -C "$HOME/website" backend_stop && return $ret
}
If the targets never fail, just pass them both.
stopdev () (
cd "$HOME/website" && make website_stop backend_stop
)
or
stopdev () {
make -C "$HOME/website" website_stop backend_stop
}
