As you gain proficiency with the shell environment it is likely that you will find yourself frequently issuing commands with the same arguments. For example, you may often use the ls command with the l and t options:
$ ls –lt
To reduce the amount of typing involved in issuing a command, it is possible to create an alias that maps to the command and arguments. For example, to create an alias such that entering the letter l will cause the ls –lt command to be executed, the following statement would be used:
$ alias l="ls –lt"
Entering l at the command prompt will now execute the original statement.