How to Create and Remove alias in Linux

Aliases are very useful when it comes to fast working in Linux. We can use alias to run a long or hard remember command with a simple word. There are two types of aliases – temporary and permanent. In this tutorial we are going to cover both topics. All commands have been executed on Ubuntu 16.04 and should work on CentOS/RHEL as well, but they are also compatible for other Linux distros.

Temporary aliases are very easy to create and remove, but they will be lost after terminal close/system reboot.

View Aliases

To view the list of all aliases, we can type:

Easy Keyword Hack

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Easy Keyword Hack

alias

or

alias -p

Create Temporary Aliases

To create a temporary alias, we need to type the following command in the terminal:

alias alias_name=’command’

Creating temporary alias is very helpful if we are going to run a command after doing changes on the system. For example, we can define alias to check the storage usage of the disk and type alias every time we need to run the desired command. In this particular case we must add the following alias:

alias disk=’df -h’

Afterward, to check disk space we can run "disk" and will see output like this:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            960M     0  960M   0% /dev
tmpfs           198M  6.3M  191M   4% /run
/dev/sda1       8.8G  4.9G  3.5G  59% /
tmpfs           986M  212K  986M   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           986M     0  986M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           198M   56K  198M   1% /run/user/1000

Besides of creating temporary aliases we can define permanent aliases which will be usable whenever you want and won’t be lost even after system reboot. Here are some basic alias examples that are predefined in most of Linux distributions:

alias rm=’rm -i’

alias ll=’ls -alF’

alias la=’ls -A’

Note that alias command applies only to current session.

Create Permanent aliases

To define a permanent alias we must add it in ~/.bashrc file. Also, we can have a separate file for all aliases (~/.bash_aliases) but to make this file to work we must append the following lines at the end of the ~/.bashrc file, using any text editor:

if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then

. ~/.bash_aliases

fi

Also we can use the following command to add alias without opening the ~/.bash_aliases file

echo "alias vps='ssh user@ip_address_of_the_remote_server'" >> ~/.bash_aliases

this alias can help us to connect to our vps server via a three-letter command

Here are some examples of permanent aliases that can help in daily work

alias update='sudo -- sh -c "apt update && apt upgrade"'    # update Ubuntu distro

alias netstat='netstat -tnlp'                   #set default options for netstat command

alias vnstat='vnstat -i eth0'                   # set eth0 as an interface for vnstat

alias flush_redis='redis-cli -h 127.0.0.1 FLUSHDB'          # flush redis cache for wp

All created aliases will work next time we log in to via ssh or open new terminal. To apply aliases immediately we can use the following command:

source ~/.bash_aliases

or

. ~/.bash_aliases

In the second command the 「.」 acts as source command.

Remove Aliases

To remove an alias we must type:

unalias alias_name

To remove all defined aliases we must type:

unalias -a

Note that unalias command also applies only to current session.

To remove permanent alias we must delete the appropriate entry in the ~/.bash_aliases file.

As mentioned before we can use unalias command to remove an alias, but that applies only to current session and if we open new terminal (or logging in via ssh) our permanent aliases will be still available.

Note that we have a permanent alias (e.g. alias ping=’ping google.com’) and we add a temporary alias during your session with the same name (e.g. alias ping=’ping facebook.com’), the temporary one will have higher privileges during current session. Thus if we type ping we will actually ping to facebook.com and not google.com until we ssh login again.

Now we know how to add aliases in Linux and make them work for us. Let us know your comments.