Dotfiles - Shell Aliases

Shell aliases for Bash or ZSH

See my full .aliases on GitHub.

Storing aliases

Aliases can be set directly in the shell config.but I prefer to keep them in a separate file called ~/.aliases. And then use it like this:

if [ -f ~/.aliases ]; then
  source ~/.aliases
fi

Here are some aliases.

List

# List file and dir names vertically.
alias l1='ls -1 -F'

e.g.

$ cd ~
$ l1
Desktop/
Documents/
Downloads/
Dropbox/
Music/
Pictures/
Public/
Temp/
Templates/
Videos/
npm/
public_repos/
repos/

Zipping

Here is how I handle zipping:

# Zip
alias tarz='tar czvf'
# Unzip
alias taru='tar xzvf'

e.g.

$ tarz foo.tar.gz fizz.txt buzz.py
$ taru foo.tar.gz

Add confirmation when losing files

Force file operations to be interactive, which means I get a confirmation message to accept before I copy or move that would overwrite a file, an whenever I delete a file.

alias rm='rm -i'
alias cp='cp -i'
alias mv='mv -i'

e.g.

$ touch foo.txt
$ rm foo.txt
rm: remove regular empty file 'foo.txt'? y
$

Jekyll

For Jekyll commands running through bundler.

alias jek='bundle exec jekyll'

e.g.

$ jek serve

Python packages

I don't like installing packages in my global Python environment, especially by accident. So I set this up in my shell config. This flag is standard for Python.

export PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV=false

Then if I run this, I can an error to protect me.

$ pip3 install requests
ERROR: Could not find an activated virtualenv (required).

So then I activate my virtual environment. Or I override with PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV=true using my alias:

alias pip-user='PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV=false python3 -m pip'

$ pip-user requests
...

Instant web server

I also find myself often starting a Python server in a directory.

So with this:

alias pserver='python3 -m http.server'

I can just run:

$ pserver
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 (http://0.0.0.0:8000/) ..

View aliases

To see all the aliases that are setup, run this:

$ alias
alias ag='alias | grep'
alias apt-i='sudo apt install'
...
alias jek='bundle exec jekyll'
alias l='ls -C -F'
alias l1='ls -1 -F'
...

That is a standard feature of alias, if not given any arguments.

I added my own feature like this for viewing all my git aliases. See that in my next post on Git Configs - Part 4.

If you have any aliases to share or need help with your syntax, comment here.