18. alias

Lesson Content

Sometimes typing commands can get really repetitive, or if you need to type a long command many times, it’s best to have an alias you can use for that. To create an alias for a command you simply specify an alias name and set it to the command.

$ alias foobar='ls -la'

Now instead of typing ls -la, you can type foobar and it will execute that command, pretty neat stuff. Keep in mind that this command won’t save your alias after reboot, so you’ll need to add a permanent alias in:

~/.bashrc

or similar files if you want to have it persist after reboot.

You can remove aliases with the unalias command:

$ unalias foobar

Exercise

Create a couple of aliases then remove them.

Quiz Question