Comments on: Unix Tip - Aliases

By: Lance Willett

Lance Willett — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 06:04:34 +0000

My favorite alias is the good ol’ long list but with color and better file size info. Of course to get the color benefit you have to add that setting (in Terminal prefs on Mac OS X or in your profile: export TERM=xterm-color).

alias lsh="ls -alhG"

I also have aliases for all the common SVN commands that I use all day long, like:

alias sva="svn add" alias svc="svn commit" alias svd="svn delete" alias svi="svn info" alias svm="svn move" alias svs="svn status" alias svu="svn update"

By: John Brewer

John Brewer — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 15:12:24 +0000

Re: here and there,

there are already built-in commands which do a similar thing for you: pushd and popd, but they don’t stick around like your ‘here’ does.

pushd /some/long/new/path (to go to the new place and remember the current one)
popd (to return to the remembered one)

By: Mutahir

Mutahir — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 02:42:30 +0000

I am a newbie to unix environment and mac osx as well, very nice tip and i hope you people contribute more here so that people like me can learn:)

Regards
Mutahir

By: Gustaf

Gustaf — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 18:32:58 +0000

I’ve created an alias which will quickly move to a “sibling” directory. Say we have two folders: ~/Desktop/Ned and ~/Desktop/Fred
If your currenty working directory is ~/Desktop/Ned and u want to switch your current working directory to Fred, normally you’d type:

cd ../Fred

Too much typing for me! Create an alias like this:

alias c,=”cd ..;cd ”

Now you can go from Ned to Fred (or visa versa) like this:

c, Fred

This saves a few keystrokes!

By: Bret Webb

Bret Webb — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 15:53:37 +0000

Good call Martin. Forgot to mention that the syntax was for csh.

By: Martin Stanhope

Martin Stanhope — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 15:17:03 +0000

Nice tip. These days one is likely to be using a bash shell on OS X which would make it:

alias here=’export THERE_PWD=`echo $PWD`’
alias there=‘cd $THERE_PWD’

Martin

By: Runar

Runar — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 14:53:03 +0000

Thanks Bret!!!
That was a really good one

By: Bret Webb

Bret Webb — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 13:52:29 +0000

I spend about 12 hours a day in the Linux CLI environment, but at the end of a hard day I like to curl up with my PowerBook… without the terminal open!

However, for those pesky little tasks I still like to use the CLI for my PowerBook. Navigation at the console level, however, is not friendly and you can end up cd’ing your way into oblivion. So, I use two aliases called “here” and “there” which facilitate getting around the directory tree.

Say you are in /Users/user/Desktop/folder/subfolder/ (which I will refer to as Dir1) and you want to edit a file in /Volumes/thumbdrive/folder/subfolder/ (which I will refer to as Dir2). That’s a lot of typing to get back and forth, no? So, while in Dir1 you simply type “here” at the CLI. When you are done messing around in Dir2 and you want to go back to Dir1, all you have to do is type “there” to go back. Out of the 30 aliases that I have, these are my favorite.

alias here ’setenv THERE_PWD `echo $PWD`’
alias there ‘cd $THERE_PWD’

-Bret