An Introduction to Useful Bash Aliases and Functions | DigitalOcean

An Introduction to Useful Bash Aliases and Functions | DigitalOcean

The more you operate on the command line, the more you will find that the majority of the commands you use are a very small subset of the available commands. Most tasks are habitual and you may run these the same way every day.

While the makers of many of the most common command utilities have attempted to eliminate extraneous typing by using shortened names (think of how many keystrokes you save daily by typing "ls" instead of "list" and "cd" instead of "change-directory"), these are not ubiquitous. Additionally, many people always run commands with the same few options enabled every time.

Luckily, bash allows us to create our own shortcuts and time-savers through the use of aliases and shell functions. In this guide, we'll discuss how to make use of these and give you some useful examples to get you started in the right direction.

How To Declare a Bash Alias

Declaring aliases in bash is very straight forward. It's so easy that you should try it now.

You can declare aliases that will last as long as your shell session by simply typing these into the command line. The syntax looks like this:

alias alias_name="command_to_run"  

Note that there is no spacing between between the neighbor elements and the equal sign. This is not optional. Spaces here will break the command.

Let's create a common bash alias now. One idiomatic command phrase that many people use frequently is ls -lha or ls -lhA (the second omits the current and parent directory listing). We can create a shortcut that can be called as ll by typing:

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