As you may have noticed, some of the strings of command lines in the Linux shell can be long, and after a while, become a pain to type. While using the shell, you can press the up and down arrows to recall previous commands and even paste commands that you may have saved in a cheat-sheet document. These features certainly help, but there are also features that appeal to the more lazy users out there. Aliases are one of those things that when you start using them, you'll wonder how you ever lived without them.

To illustrate the value of command aliases, consider the following command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

The previous command will first update your cached package sources and then install any updates that may be available for the packages installed on your system. To be fair, this command isn't the longest one in the world; it's just two commands strung together (using && in between them). However, it is long enough, and you...