Show me your aliases and i'll show you mine ;-)

[Termy]

...

Good idea for an alias.

[c.f.a.j]

I have no aliases. As the bash man page says, "For almost every purpose, aliases are superseded by shell functions."

[sofasurfer]

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alias m4a='cd Downloads; for f in *m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -vn "$f".mp3;rm "$f";done;cd
alias batvol='cd Downloads; mkdir -p louder; for f in *.mp3; do   ffmpeg -i "$f" -filter:a "volume=3.5" "louder/$f";rm "$f"; done;cd ~
alias mp3='cd Downloads/louder; for f in *.mp3 ;do mv "$f" /media/daryl/"Clip Sport"/Podcasts ;done; cd ~'
[.code]

[AwesomeOpossum74]

Linux was designed to be efficient, which is why we have terse/short commands; typing 3 letters is better than 10. Aliases are great at facilitating that functionality.

I think it's great for adding things like --color=auto, that we wouldn't want to type every time, but that grant much usability.

As mentioned, and as was my first thought, they can cause you to forget the actual commands and parameters, so we must be careful. But, we have a backup in case we're on a foreign machine ... man. So all is not lost.

I tend to disagree with the way they aliased ll,la,l separately in our .bashrc files. That's getting too superfluous and clogged, IMO. What if you installed a utility executed as ll or la or l? You'd 1: not have access to those commands until you removed the alias. 2: You'd have to unlearn the aliased version.

I think .bash_aliases is a superfluous file, and just adds another item to our home directory lists. It's not like it's hard to manage aliases in our .bashrc files.

[Termy]

I think .bash_aliases is a superfluous file, and just adds another item to our home directory lists. It's not like it's hard to manage aliases in our .bashrc files.

I find it very useful to keep these things separate. My BASH configuration files aren't especially short and simple, so that would make for a rather large file if I slammed them all together.

My '.bashrc' is 169 lines long, my '.bash_functions' file is 474 lines long. I no longer use '.bash_aliases', because I converted all of my aliases to functions a while ago. I just prefer having them separate, plus it means I can easily source one without the other(s). For a simpler/smaller configuration, I'd certainly agree with you, however. I actually removed a lot of functions/aliases from my configuration, so there used to be quite a bit more.

[LittleScriptMan]

I find it very useful to keep these things separate. My BASH configuration files aren't especially short and simple, so that would make for a rather large file if I slammed them all together.

I quite agree. I have even a 3rd file besides aliases (small) and functions (large) which is a file with constant values containing for example color and attributes for tput and echo (more easy to remember TRedfg or ERedfg than tputsetaf1 or '\033[0;30m' or dir variables like FFDir which points to the Firefox directory so that if one day Mozilla changes its dir location or if I have to install a flatpak, I'll just have to change this constant to let all my FF scripts work fine again. This file adds custom variables to the system environment and I'm using a first-letter-upcase naming in order to avoid collisions with system variables using only uppercase and shell commands always using lowercase.

[Termy]

...

Sounds interesting. Do you have your configurations on GitHub at all? I'd like to check them out.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

...As mentioned, and as was my first thought, they can cause you to forget the actual commands and parameters, so we must be careful...

Then you have people like me who either can't remember the commands in the first place or can't type them out without typos.

[Termy]

Then you have people like me who either can't remember the commands in the first place or can't type them out without typos.

I suppose that's one of the reasons why we have GUIs.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Then you have people like me who either can't remember the commands in the first place or can't type them out without typos.

I suppose that's one of the reasons why we have GUIs.

Prexactly!

[ganamant]

I always like using the -h option for human-readable output when the commands support it. Here are some of my favourite aliases:

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alias ll='ls -lh'
alias du='du -h'
alias df='df -h'
alias free='free -h'

[Termy]

I always like using the -h option for human-readable output when the commands support it. Here are some of my favourite aliases:

Fun fact, regarding human-readable format: you can use numfmt(1) to convert raw numbers to a human-readable size. There are some caveats, but in the right situation, it's awesome. I got that tip from xenopeek a while back on this board, IIRC. Here's an example, showing the total RAM found on the system, using the --from-unit flag to specify that it starts at Kibibyte:

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awk '$1 == "MemTotal:" {print($2)}' /proc/meminfo | numfmt --from-unit=K --to=iec

Also, I'm bored stuff right now, so here's a random command you might like:

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du -h --max-depth=1 "$HOME" | sort -rhk 1 | sed -r "1d; s/^(.+\t+)\/home\/$USER(\/.*)\$/\1~\2/" | column

It shows a sorted and columnized list of space-hungry directories in your HOME, with a more user-friendly path display.

[AZgl1800]

me?

fun one.

OkieNotFromMuskogee

[Koentje]

Old habits..

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alias cd..='cd ..'
alias cls='echo -en "\033c"'

[LittleScriptMan]

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alias cls='echo -en "\033c"'

Is the clear command not doing the same job ?

[Termy]

Is the clear command not doing the same job ?

clear(1) is part of NCurses; specifically, the 'ncurses-bin' package, which may not have been around back in the day, hence "old habits". Nowadays, yes, clear(1) and tput clear should more than suffice. In scripts, it might be quite nice to use the escape sequence, because it's more efficient, but it's not nearly as portable, if you assume all systems have tput(1) or clear(1).

[mrcat]

I like to have these aliases

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alias llt='ls -ltrh'
alias lla='ls -la'

alias ..='cd ..'
alias ...='cd ../../../'
alias ....='cd ../../../../'
alias .....='cd ../../../../'
alias h='history'