16.B: Screen Appearance

16: Customizing

16: Customizing

§ 16.A: Alias for Commands

The alias command makes life nicer for you. And so we recommend it. Frequently-used commands, especially those requiring many options, can be shortened into a shorter command that does the same thing as the original.

There are two ways to use alias. The first is by just typing it at the prompt

> alias real-command='newname'

Here real-command is the command the computer actually executes, and newname is the alias for it. You have already seen an example of an alias with the long list ll command, which is really an alias for ls -l.

You may be able to see other examples of aliases by typing:

grep alias .*

On the OSU Physics cluster, you will see something like

.cshrc.AIX:alias cp 'cp -i'
.cshrc.AIX:alias mv 'mv -i'
.cshrc.AIX:alias rm 'rm -i'
.cshrc.AIX:alias ls 'ls -FC'
.cshrc.AIX:alias ll 'ls -l'
.cshrc.AIX:alias msgs 'msgs -p'
.cshrc.AIX:alias setprompt 'set prompt="%~::%m> " '
.cshrc.AIX:alias   chfn 'echo "not available"'
.cshrc.OSF1:alias cp 'cp -i'
.cshrc.OSF1:alias mv 'mv -i'
.cshrc.OSF1:alias rm 'rm -i'
.cshrc.OSF1:alias ls 'ls -FC'
.cshrc.OSF1:alias ll 'ls -l'
.cshrc.OSF1:alias mail mailx
.cshrc.OSF1:alias msgs 'msgs -p'
.cshrc.OSF1:alias setprompt 'set prompt="%~:%m> " '
.cshrc.OSF1:alias quota vquota
.cshrc.OSF1:alias chsh  'echo "not available"'
.cshrc.OSF1:alias chfn  'echo "not available"'

Did you know Unix was doing so much for you? (It's really so friendly.) Why not check the aliased commands in the man pages to see what they do.

If you are on a workstation cluster, you may have different .cshrc file for each type of machine. On the Physics cluster, the .cshrc.AIX file is for IBM machines and the .cshrc.OSF1 file is for DEC machines.

Let's create a new alias. We assume that your username on the machine ucs is different from your username on your regular machine. So if try to telnet to ucs with

> telnet ucs