Exec doesn't know about shell aliases. Only what's in the $PATH.
I liked the shell in MPW (Mac Programmer's Workshop, pre-NeXT) where common commands had both long names and short ones. You'd type the short ones at the prompt, but use the long, unambiguous ones in scripts.
Ive taken entire web farms offline due to an unexpected expansion of a command on a Cisco load balancer.
The command in question was:
administer-all-port-shutdown
And so I went to log in via serial port (like I said, *many years ago so this device didn’t have SSH), didn’t get the prompt I was expecting. So typed the user name again:
admin
The worst part of the story is that this happened twice before I realised what I’d done!
I still maintain that the full command is a stupid name if it means a phrase as common as “admin” can turn your load balancer off. But I also learned a few valuable lessons about being more careful when running commands on Cisco gear.
PowerShell has long commands and short aliases, but the aliases can still shadow executables, e.g. the `sc` alias for `Set-Content` shadows `sc.exe` for configuring services. And you only notice when you see no output and weird text files in the current working directory.