Writing Alias in a ZSH For Loop selects only the final loop iteration

I’m editing my .zshrc file to create aliases for different courses I’m taking at university. I currently do this for 5 courses:

alias 301='cd /Users/<...>/university/ELEC301'

Because all my courses have the same parent folder, I’m trying to do this as a for loop rather than having 10 lines of this same command with a different course code.

I have tried this but I end up getting an alias that only aliases to the last element of the array, despite my echo command printing what I expect:

courses=(301 302 303)
for course in $courses; do
    echo $course
    alias $course='cd /Users/<...>/university/ELEC${course}'
done

In my ZSH terminal, when I run the alias 301, it consistently directs me to my 303 folder, or whichever is the final element of the array, despite my echo printing:

301
302
303

I’ve tried writing the array differently, changing the order of the echo, using an intermediate variable. I’m not sure what’s going on and appreciate the help.

>Solution :

By putting the variable course into single-quotes ' you prevent your shell from expanding it.

You need to use double-quotes " instead.

That:

courses=(301 302 303)
for course in $courses; do
    echo "$course"
    alias $course="cd /Users/<...>/university/ELEC$course"
done

would work fine.