summary: Why does this fail $ ssh foo 'R --version | head -n 1' bash: R: command not found but this succeeds $ ssh foo 'grep -nHe 'bashrc' ~/.bash_profile' /home/me/.bash_profile:3:# source the users .bashrc if it exists /home/me/.bash_profile:4:if [ -f "${HOME}/.bashrc" ] ; then /home/me/.bash_profile:5: source "${HOME}/.bashrc" $ ssh foo 'grep -nHe "\WR\W" ~/.bashrc' /home/me/.bashrc:118:alias R='/share/linux86_64/bin/R' $ ssh foo '/share/linux86_64/bin/R --version | head -n 1' R version 2.14.1 (2011-12-22) ? details: I am a (rootless) user on 2 clusters. One uses environment modules, so any given server on that cluster can provide (via module add) pretty much the same resources. The other cluster, on which I must also unfortunately work, has servers managed individually, so I get in the habit of doing, e.g., EXEC_NAME='whatever' for S in 'foo' 'bar' 'baz' ; do ssh ${SERVER} "${EXEC_NAME} --version" done This works fine for packages installed normally/consistently, but often (for reasons unknown to me) packages are not: e.g. (compare alias below to alias above), $ ssh bar 'R --version | head -n 1' bash: R: command not found $ ssh bar 'grep -nHe 'bashrc' ~/.bash_profile' /home/me/.bash_profile:3:# source the users .bashrc if it exists /home/me/.bash_profile:4:if [ -f "${HOME}/.bashrc" ] ; then /home/me/.bash_profile:5: source "${HOME}/.bashrc" $ ssh bar 'grep -nHe "\WR\W" ~/.bashrc' /home/me/.bashrc:118:alias R='/share/linux/bin/R' $ ssh bar '/share/linux86_64/bin/R --version | head -n 1' R version 2.14.1 (2011-12-22) Using aliases copes well with these install differences when I interactively shell into the server, but fails when I try to script ssh commands (as above); i.e., # interactively $ ssh foo ... foo> R --version calls my alias for R on remote host=foo, but # scripting $ ssh foo 'R --version' doesn't. What do I need to do to make ssh foo "<command/>" load my aliases on the remote host?