Your problem is most likely escaping. $1 has a meaning in regex and in shell. You want the former and the single quotes achieve this.

In your second example, with alias, probably the shell interpreting this replaces $1 with whatever the first arg in the shell environment is, probably the empty string.

Not sure what the problem with the shell script is. Anyway try escaping the $ as $ and \ as \.

You can see where you are wrong if you replace prename with echo for debugging. Or in a shell script do

set -ex

Didn’t they just cut the funding?

Valid question. You can ask this about many things:

Would the Internet as we know it exist if Facebook, AOL, and Yahoo had united to create a walled garden?

Would Macbooks as we know them today exist without an open source ecosystem? Would the company Appke exist? Would there be an iPhone?

Would the web exist without Linux? Both developed at the same time, 1991 till now, and most stuff runs on Linux servers.

Would the people who build all the hardware and software even be interested in computers had they not played with (build) computers in the 90ies? What if we had given them an iPad aith CandyCrush that just works; and not BIOS codes, cables, extension cards and drivers?