Useful Bash Aliases

| Comments

Over the years I’ve accumulated a lot of useful aliases for my Bash shell. I rarely see others using many aliases, so I thought I’d share mine. This list can get somewhat long, so I recommend putting these in a .bash_aliases file and sourcing it from your .bashrc with:

1

[[ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]] && . ~/.bash_aliases

Any content surrounded by angled brackets (<>) are machine/user specific, so don’t forget to replace them with the correct values.

.bash_aliases
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79

# ls aliases
alias ls='ls --color'
alias ll='ls -lh --color'
alias la='ls -lA --color'
alias l='ls'

# safe file management
alias cp='cp -iv'
alias rm='rm -i'
alias mv='mv -i'

# quick directory movement
alias ..='cd ..'
alias ...='cd ../..'
alias ....='cd ../../..'

# go to the last directory you were in
alias back='cd $OLDPWD'

# display numbers in a human readable format
alias df='df -h'
alias du='du -h'
alias free='free -h'

# copy the current working directory to the clipboard
alias cpwd='pwd | xclip -selection clipboard'

# quickly find files and directory
alias ff='find . -type f -name'
alias fd='find . -type d -name'

# get internet speed
alias speedtest='wget -O /dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip'

# get external ip
alias extip='curl icanhazip.com'

# quickly source the .bashrc file
alias srcbash='. ~/.bashrc'

# tail any apache/php error files
alias tailall='tailf /var/log/httpd/<my-website>-error_log'

# git number aliases (https://github.com/holygeek/git-number)
alias gn='git number'
alias ga='git number add'

# change the current directory to the parent directory that contains the .git folder
alias git-root='cd "`git rev-parse --show-toplevel`"'

# print the path with each directory separated by a newline
alias path='echo -e ${PATH//:/\\n}'

# list the name of the process matched with pgrep
alias pgrep='pgrep -l'

# make less properly handle colored output
alias lessr='less -R'

# open any file in GNOME from the command line
alias gopen='gvfs-open'

# start programs quietly
alias gdb='gdb -q'
alias bc='bc -ql'

# adb logcat aliases
alias logcat-sys='adb logcat -s System.out:D'
alias logcat-e='adb logcat -s *:E'

# key management aliases: fingerprint a pubkey and retrieve pubkey from a private key
alias fingerprint='ssh-keygen -lf'
alias pubkey='ssh-keygen -y -f'

# display hexdump in canonical form
alias hd='hexdump -C'

# print the current time
alias now='date +%T'

Some commands can’t be done with aliases. For those commands, we can use functions (I normally put these in a .bash_functions file and source it from my .bashrc just like I do for the .bash_aliases file):

.bash_functions
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45

# edit the selected bash config file
function editbash {
    echo $1
    if [[ "$1" == "a" ]]; then
        emacs ~/.bash_aliases
    elif [[ "$1" == "f" ]]; then
        emacs ~/.bash_functions
    else
        emacs ~/.bashrc
    fi
    echo "done"
}

# print the last ten modified files in the specified directory
function last {
    ls -lt $1 | head
}

# copy a file to the clipboard from the command line
function copyfile {
    cat $1 | xclip -selection clipboard
}

# shortcut for recursively grepping
function gr {
    grep -r $1 .
}

# shortcut for compiling and running Java programs (I use this for competitions)
function j {
    filename="${1%.*}"
    javac $filename.java
    if [[ $? == 0 ]]; then
       java $filename
    fi
}

# shortcut for compiling and running C++ programs
function g {
    filename="${1%.*}"
    g++ $filename.cpp -o $filename
    if [[ $? == 0 ]]; then
       ./$filename
    fi
}

Got any other good aliases to add? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll add them to the list.

Comments