Aliases are a way of effectively assigning a name to a given collection of commands or a single command line. The .bashrc
file that comes with every standard issue bash shell includes a few useful ones by default. A few of them are as follows:
# enable color support of ls and also add handy aliases if [ -x /usr/bin/dircolors ]; then test -r ~/.dircolors && eval "$(dircolors -b ~/.dircolors)" || eval "$(dircolors -b)" alias ls='ls --color=auto' #alias dir='dir --color=auto' #alias vdir='vdir --color=auto' alias grep='grep --color=auto' alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto' alias egrep='egrep --color=auto' fi # some more ls aliases alias ll='ls -alF' alias la='ls -A'
What these do is allow you to use one—usually simpler—command to invoke a number of complex commands. So, with respect to the previous code, you can use grep
to invoke grep –-color=auto
, which enables text output highlighting or color printing.
The general purpose or aim of aliases is to make...