Linux Alias question
 

Hey guys.
Got a question, I'm playing around with my alias's and I have a ton that I'm going to need to add, but I was hoping that there was a way that I could edit the actual file. I seem to remember on my personal linux comp, the file for the alias thing was in your home dir, but I can't seem to find it there. Any idea where it might be? Thanks
btw, the place it's on is slackware 9, and other then that, I can't really tell ya because the guy who owns it won't tell us.

If using bash, edit .bash_profile in your home dir.

Since it starts with ".", you won't see it without doing an ls -a

add:
alias aliasname=`command with full path`

Make sure to use backticks, not single quotes.

Boner:
When doing an alias, you don't want to use backticks. The use of backticks in a bourne based shell is to substitute the output of the command between the backticks in place of that string. I guess that makes no sense.

What I mean is if for example you had a command called foo, which does nothing than output "bar". Then if you aliased baz in the method that you specified, when you call baz it would try to call a command bar which may or may not exist. ie:
$ foo
bar
$ alias baz=`foo`
$ baz
bash: bar: command not found

You actually want to use single quotes or double quotes. ie:
$ ls
bar baz foo
$ alias ll='ls -l'
$ ll
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 dave dave 0 Sep 20 16:35 bar
-rw-r--r-- 1 dave dave 0 Sep 20 16:35 baz
-rw-r--r-- 1 dave dave 0 Sep 20 16:35 foo

Of course, this doesn't just apply to alias, but bourne derived shells in general (and most also applies to korn and c shells).

Hope that clarifies things.

Hi Dave,

You are obsolutely right. I'm sitting here wondering why the hell I wrote to use the backticks... I written a lot of bash scripts that use backticks to use command output, but for some reason my brain segfaulted and I wrote it all backerds.

Thanks for the catch!

I like to keep aliases in a separate dotfile. It's cleaner from a logic standpoint. So I've got a lovely ~/.aliases file that gets sourced from ~/.bash_profile.

I'm something of an alias whore--I have aliases to log me into dozens of different SSH and remote MySQL servers, for instance--so a logical separation is very useful for me.

my ~/.cshrc calls a separate file ~/shellwreck (yes, bad pun) which by now has grown to over three kbytes in size.

tail -2 .cshrc
# This file is boring. let's read in an interesting one.
source ~/shellwreck

tail -2 shellwreck
#confirm reading of this file
echo Shell aliases enabled.

the external file is very nice when you add stuff at any given time...which I use things like this for...
alias vc 'vi ~/shellwreck'
alias .c 'source ~/shellwreck'
alias a alias
alias u unalias

I just about constantly hyper-optimize my workspace. most of my aliases are just one or two characters.

I started this alias file over ten years ago and have taken it with me from machine to machine...colleges, home, elsewhere...

btw...Have any of you bash users got a prompt string half as useful as "%{^[[46;30m%}%m%{^[[m%} %{^[[36;1m%}%l%{^
%{^[[30;44m%}%@%{^[[m%}%{^[[30;47m%}%h%{^[[37;40m%} " ? ;)

\[\033[${PROMPT_COLOR1}m\][\[\033[${PROMPT_COLOR2}m\]\u@\h\[\033[${PROMPT_COLOR1
}m\]]\[\033[${PROMPT_COLOR3}m\]-\[\033[${PROMPT_COLOR1}m\][\[\033[${PROMPT_COLOR
2}m\]pts/3\[\033[${PROMPT_COLOR1}m\]]\[\033[${PROMPT_COLOR3}m\]-\[\033[${PROMPT_
COLOR1}m\]\[\033[${PROMPT_COLOR1}m\][\[\033[${PROMPT_COLOR2}m\]\w\[\033[${PROMPT
_COLOR1}m\]]\[\033[0m\]\n\[\033[1;36m\][\[\033[0;36m\]0\[\033[1;36m\]\[\033[1;36
m\]]\[\033[1;37m\]\[\033[0m\]$\[\033[0m\]