What are your preferred bash aliases?

Bash aliases are great ways to increase productivity by bundling commands behind a single alias. What are your favorites? Share in the comments!

Comments

[John Robertson]

The next time you are debugging a bash script, give this one a try:

PS4='+ $BASH_SOURCE:$LINENO '
set -xv

[Hải]

# Clone and edit function
cled() {
    local dir_name clone_dir
    clone_dir=~/github
    dir_name=$(echo "$1" | cut -d '/' -f5)
    echo "$dir_name"

    test -d $clone_dir && cd $clone_dir || mkdir $clone_dir; cd $clone_dir
    git clone --depth=1 $1
    cd $dir_name && code ./
}

I use this function to quickly (shallow) clone a github repo and open it with my favorite editor.

[Eljay-Adobe]

I like to make my ~/.bash_profile able to be re-sourced multiple times. Because I'll change it, and then re-source it. But I don't want my PATH to become super long with duplicates. So I check PATH before appending or prepending a path.

[[ ":${PATH}:" == *":/usr/local/bin:"* ]] || PATH="/usr/local/bin:${PATH}"

---

I use SCOWL to look up words frequently. So I like to be able to grep words no matter where I am.

function scowl {
  pushd /Users/eljay/bin/scowl-2018.04.16/final >/dev/null
  grep "$@" *
  popd >/dev/null
}

---

I'm often on a Macintosh using Terminal.app, and I like to be able to clear the screen and clear the scrollback buffer in one command.

alias cls="clear; printf '\033[3J'"

---

I'm always making little C++ toy programs to test out a thought. I like to compile in a specific way, so a handy alias to the rescue.

export CXXWARN='-Weverything -Wno-c++98-compat -Wno-c++98-compat-pedantic -Wno-padded -pedantic -fsanitize=undefined,null,address,bounds,bool,enum'
alias c17='/usr/bin/clang++ ${CXXWARN} -std=c++17'

---

I often want to go up directory levels or to HOME quickly.

alias ..='cd ..'
alias ..2='cd ../..'
alias ..3='cd ../../..'
alias ~='cd ~'

---

When I do mkdir I often follow it with cd to that directory. So I've combined the operations. (Sometime I tweak it to be lazy and cd into the directory if it already exists. Sometimes I don't like that behavior, and take it out.)

function mkcd {
  if [ -n "$1" -a ! -a "$1" ]
  then
    mkdir "$1"
    cd "$1"
  else
    echo NO
  fi
}

---

Sometimes I'm editing an HTML file (and possibly associated CSS and JavaScript files), and I want Chrome to reload my local page for me when it changes. (I think I got fswatch through brew.)

function watch {
    local DIR=$PWD

    if [ -n "$1" ]
    then
        DIR="$1"
    fi

    fswatch -o "$DIR" | xargs -n1 -I {} osascript -e 'tell application "Google Chrome" to tell the active tab of its first window to reload'
}

[Oinak]

.. is cd ..
e is $EDITOR (gvim on Linux, mvim on Mac)
e. is e . to open $EDITOR on the current folder
g is git and I use git aliases ci co pus pul for sub-commands
dk is docker and dc is docker-compose
And we have a rich bin folder on each project with specific scripts like bin/qa_deploy_branch etc

[Chris Castle]

The usuals:

alias g='git'
alias h='heroku'

A shortcut: c to be able to quickly jump to any of my local project directories inside my ~/Code directory.

Fish shell function:

function c
  if test -z $argv
    cd ~/Code
  else
    cd ~/Code/$argv
  end
end

Full source (including tab completion) installable using Fisher.

Also, vpn to connect to or disconnect from corporate (Cisco AnyConnect) VPN (source).

[Fran C.]

I think that my 2 favortites and the 2 I use more are, no doubt:

alias e='${(z)VISUAL:-${(z)EDITOR}}'
alias g='git'

[Nočnica Mellifera Heroku]

Wait, what is that first one foist?

[Fran C.]

I didn't know what it was doing until you asked. I've had it copy/pasted around my dot-files many times. I've just realized now that it does not work on BASH, only on ZSH, sorry :(

EDIT: I mean... I know I always use e to open my editor. What I didn't know was why was I using such a complex alias to do it.

TL;DR:

It uses $VISUAL or $EDITOR and makes sure that it properly handles any extra parameter given to it. So somehting line vim -a -b -c works.

Detailed explanation

Got it from here github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto/bl...

What it does If I'm not mistaken is to alias e to either the value of $VISUAL or $EDITOR. But to only do that it would be enough with:

alias e='${VISUAL:-${EDITOR}}`

There's also this (z) that I just learned on ZSH is an expansion flag. Looking into ZSH manual it says:

z

    Split the result of the expansion into words using shell parsing to find
    the words, i.e. taking into account any quoting in the value. Comments are
    not treated specially but as ordinary strings, similar to interactive
    shells with the INTERACTIVE_COMMENTS option unset (however, see the Z flag
    below for related options)

    Note that this is done very late, even later than the ‘(s)’ flag. So to
    access single words in the result use nested expansions as in
    ‘${${(z)foo}[2]}’. Likewise, to remove the quotes in the resulting words
    use ‘${(Q)${(z)foo}}’.

but I still didn't know what it means... so I tried to do:

VISUAL='nvim -v' # This just writes the nvim version
alias e='${VISUAL:-${EDITOR}}'

If I then I've tried

$ e
zsh: command not found: nvim -v

That doesn't happen if I try with (z) flag on the expansion alias e='${(z)VISUAL:-${(z)EDITOR}}'.

PS: Thanks a lot for making me look it up :)

[Nočnica Mellifera Heroku]

Please write this up into an article or I will, it’s great! And since OS X switched from Bash to zsh I Can actually use it!

[Fran C.]

Done! dev.to/nflamel/til-how-my-complica...

I'll try to see if I have more things like that around my dot-files to see which ones are worthy of some more articles.

[Joe]

Here are a few of mine:

Make log times human readable

alias dmesg='dmesg -T'

Remove editor backup files

alias rmtl='rm -f *~'

And a couple of functions (in ~/.bashrc)

Change to my ~/bin directory

bin() {
cd $HOME/bin
echo -en "\t\t"
pwd
}

Quick calculation

## Command line calculator
calc() {
    bc -l <<< "$@"
}

I have several aliases that just cd to directories I use a lot.

I have a simple activity log program I wrote in bash that writes to a text file. It has eleven aliases to invoke its features and to create entries for my most common activities that I can just tack details on the end of.

[Rafed Muhammad Yasir]

rafed.github.io/devra/posts/termin...

You might find the section on aliases interesting.

[Viktor Sokolov]

One of my favorite aliases is to get a quick answer from StackOverflow
using howdoi package

sudo apt-get install howdoi
alias how="howdoi $* -c"

The cross-platform solution to open current directory form terminal

if [ ! $(uname -s) = 'Darwin' ]; then
    if grep -q Microsoft /proc/version; then
        # Ubuntu on Windows using the Linux subsystem
        alias open='explorer.exe';
    else
        alias open='xdg-open';
    fi
fi

more of my settings can be found here: github.com/victory-sokolov/dotfiles

[Joe]

If you like howdoi, check out tldr. It works like man, but only shows usage examples. It's in the regular Ubuntu repos.

[Nočnica Mellifera Heroku]

Definitely going to use this.

[Cod3slinger]

I'm always a fan of:

alias please='sudo $(fc -ln -1)'

That is, rerun the last typed command, but prepend it with 'sudo' this time.