Forty lashes with a wet noodle for me for posting the wrong thing. The code above should work now; I've reduced it to a single line. This time I actually tested them. :$

It appears you don't have...

Without the backslash, the shell checks to see if there is an alias for the command. If so, it uses it.

With the backslash, the shell skips this check and runs the first version of the command...