How do you cycle through sequentially numbered aliases?

Question

I have 3 aliases. They are named echo1, echo2, echo3

How do i execute all 3 of them as part of a larger command?

$ alias echo1='echo 1'
$ alias echo2='echo 2'
$ alias echo3='echo 3'

$ echo1
1

$ echo2
2

$ echo3
3

$ echo{1..3}
bash: echo1: command not found

$ bash -ic echo{1..3}
echo2: echo1: command not found

$ bash -ic 'echo{1..3}'
bash: echo1: command not found

Solution: based on Kusalananda's answer:

 printf '%s\n' {1..3} | xargs -I {} bash -ic "echo{}"

Answer 1

Because of the order of evaluation of things, echo$i would be evaluated to the string echo1 (for i=1) after alias expansion.

To be able to make use of the string as an alias, you need to re-evaluate the resulting string:

for i in 1 2 3; do
    eval "echo$i"
done

If echo1, echo2 and echo3 had been shell functions, then the eval had not been needed (tested in Bash 4.4).

Your attempts with bash -c will not work as the aliases are local to the current shell session.

Your initial thing

echo{1..3}

would result in

echo1 echo2 echo3

Even if echo1 had been expanded to echo 1, the result had been the output of the string

1 echo2 echo3

---

Personally, depending on what you'd wanted the aliases to actually do, I would have implemented a function:

dothing () {
    printf '%s\n' "$@"
}

... and then called that with

dothing {1..3}

to produce

1
2
3

Of course, that would have been achieved with printf '%s\n' {1..3} directly...

Answer 2

Why not making another function who execute the aliases?

function execute_all_aliases{
  alias1
  alias2
  alias3
}

Answer 3

You could always do:

eval echo{1..3}\;

That is tell the shell to evaluate the expansion of that as shell code, that is evaluate:

echo1; echo2; echo3;

Some other variants:

eval echo{1..3}$'\n' # separate with newline instead of ;. Can make a
                     # difference for things like alias echo1='echo x|'
                     # alias echo2='tr x y'

eval echo{1..3}'&&' : # only run the next one if the previous one succeeded

Answer 4

Thanks to @Kusalananda I came up with the following solution:

printf '%s\n' {1..3} | xargs -I {} bash -ic "echo{}"

This will achieve the goal of executing n amount of aliases named sequentially with other command parts