Aliases are a powerful tool for the forgetful, the lazy, and the efficient.
They take commands that you commonly use and shorten them to a specified
command.
They are created in hidden files, which are titled with a . due to the
difficulty to delete them. In your home directory (cd), list everything
(ls -a) to show the hidden files.
There is likely something titled .bash_profile or .bash_aliases.
If so, open it with vi.
If not, use vi .bash_aliases to create one.
[Note: if you’re not using a bash shell, look for a similar file for the shell
you are using.]
The easiest way to explain the alias, is by giving an example alias.
Say you want to make it easy to ssh to a computer.
You want to just type comp.
In this case, make a line in the “.” file (make sure to do it after the
#alias line if there is one!) that looks like:
alias comp='ssh euid123@talon3.hpc.unt.edu'
and save by using :.wq.
Every time you update a .bash file, you need to tell the computer that you
changed something.
You can do this in a few ways.
The annoyingly long way would be to restart your computer.
Surely you can imagine why that would not be ideal.
The easy way is to source the file.
Basically your computer is like “OH, THAT’S NEW!”
The following example will demonstrate that.
$ source ~/.bash_profile
You might be thinking to yourself, “Why is there a tilde?” In which case, I direct you to the section on home directories.