Alias For Mac Os X



How to Create an IP Alias in Mac OS X using ifconfig. @Terrence Brown. IP aliasing is the ability to add more than one IP address to a network interface or resource allowing a node on a network to have multiple connections to a network. Old school Mac users may find it fun to use aliases (or symlinks) to put a Trash can on the Mac desktop too. Keyboard shortcut to create alias on Mac: Command L. If you select an item in the Finder and then hit Command + L you will instantly create an alias of the selected item.

Home > Articles > Apple > Operating Systems

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  1. Finding Configuration Files
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Learn how to customize your OS X environment, including the shell prompt, shortcuts, installation of new software, and vi, by changing your configuration files, environment variables, and tbe path.
This chapter is from the book Alias

Fix Alias Mac Os X

UNIX for Mac OS X: Visual QuickPro Guide

This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Many user-configurable Unix programs (such as your shell) read configuration files when they start up. These configuration files contain settings and commands that determine how the programs will behave—for instance, the files can modify the list of places your shell looks for the commands you enter (that list is called your PATH).

You change your Unix environment to have it more closely match your personal preferences and to shape it more closely to the way you work.

Examples of configuring your Unix environment include:

  • Customizing your shell prompt so that it displays information you want to see.

  • Creating shortcuts for commonly used command/option combinations (these can be 'aliases,' but they are distinct from the aliases you create in the Finder, and from the shell functions, which are short scripts that are part of your private configuration).

  • Making it easier to use additional software you install; for example, if you add /Developer/Tools to your PATH, then you can use the commands in the /Developer/Tools directory without typing their full pathnames.

  • Configuring specific programs such as vi to turn on various options whenever you use them, much the same way that traditional Mac programs often have a preferences dialogue box.

The first program to configure is your shell, since your shell is the primary program you use to interact with Unix. Mac os icons for rocketdock. We will also show you how to configure the vi editor by editing a configuration file it uses (see Chapter 6, 'Editing and Printing Files,' to learn how to use vi).

It should come as no surprise by now that you configure your shell by editing text files.

Finding Configuration Files

User-configurable Unix programs (including your shell, the vi editor, and others) look for configuration files in your home directory when they start up. Most of the commands you have learned so far are not user-config-urable; neither the ls nor the cd command uses configuration files, for example. They do accept options on the command line but do not read any configuration files when you run them.

Many configuration filenames begin with a dot (.), so they are called dot files (use ls -a to see them). Often the filenames end in 'rc' (for resource). For example, the main config-uration file for the tcsh shell is ~/.tcshrc, a configuration file for the bash shell is ~/.bash_profile, and the configuration file for the vi editor is called ~/.exrc (ex is an older editor, and vi provides a 'visual interface' for it). There are actually several config-uration files available for each shell, and Table 7.1 lists the more common ones. In this chapter, we will concentrate on the ones you would change in the course of normal use. These files each have settings and commands for the particular program being configured. (Remember that ~ [the tilde] is a synonym for your home directory.)

Configuration files for shells are actually scripts. This means they are a series of commands written in the scripting language for the corresponding shell. They make use of variables, if-then conditions, and other scripting elements such as loops. (See Chapter 9, 'Creating and Using Scripts,' for more on scripts.)

Table 7.1 A Summary of Common Shells

Shell

Name and Description

sh

Bourne shell. The oldest and most standardized shell. Widely used for system startup files (scripts run during system startup). Installed in Mac OS X.

bash

Bash (Bourne Again SHell) is an improved version of sh. Combines features from csh, sh, and ksh. Very widely used, especially on Linux systems. See the Bash Reference Manual online (http://www.gnu.org/manual/bash/). Installed in Mac OS X.

csh

C shell. Provides scripting features that have a syntax similar to that of the C programming language (originally written by Bill Joy). Installed in Mac OS X.

ksh

Korn shell. Developed at AT&T by David Korn in the early 1980s. Ksh is widely used for programming. It is now open-source software, although you must agree to AT&T's license to install it. See the KornShell Web site (http://www.kornshell.com).

tcsh

An improved version of csh. The t in tcsh comes from the TENEX and TOPS-20 operating systems, which provided a command-completion feature that the creator (Ken Greer) of tcsh included in his new shell. Wilfredo Sanchez, formerly lead engineer on Mac OS X for Apple, worked on tcsh in the early 1990s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

How to read a schwinn serial number. zsh

Z shell. Created in 1990, zsh combines features from tcsh, bash, and ksh, and adds many of its own. Installed in Mac OS X. The Web site for Z shell is http://zsh.sourceforge.net.


Am I Configuring the Terminal Application or My Shell?

There's an important distinction to understand here.

The Terminal application you are using to access the command line in Mac OS X is not the same as your shell.

Terminal is a regular Mac OS X graphical application, like your Web browser or word processor. When you open a new window in Terminal, the application runs the appropriate Unix shell (determined by the Terminal application's preferences). Terminal is the program that is handling the screen display and keyboard input for the shell. When you type something in Terminal, the Terminal application passes that to the shell, and when the shell produces output, Terminal draws it on your screen.

The subtle point here is that there are actually other ways besides Terminal in which you can use your shell. One example: You can connect to your Mac using the command line over a network from another machine, which we'll cover in Chapter 10, 'Interacting with Other Unix Machines.' So when we tell you in this chapter that a change you make will take effect 'in the next Terminal window you open,' that is really a shorthand way of saying that the change will take effect in the next instance of your shell that you run, and that the easiest way to see it is to open a new Terminal window.

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Home > Articles > Apple > Operating Systems

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  1. Shell Aliases
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This chapter is from the book
UNIX for Mac OS X: Visual QuickPro Guide

This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Alias

Shell Aliases

Shell aliases are shortcut names for commands. Each alias consists of one word (or even one letter) that you can use instead of a longer command line. For example, you may find yourself using the command ls -F a lot. You can easily make a shortcut for that command: lf, for example. So when you use lf where the shell expects a command, then the shell will substitute ls -F.

To see all your current aliases:

  • alias

    The alias command with no arguments displays all your current aliases. The first item on each line is the alias (which must always be a single string, with no spaces), and the rest of the line is the full command for which the alias is a shortcut. Figure 7.9 shows the default aliases for the tcsh shell. You can see that the alias l is a shortcut for the command ls -lg. The first word on each line is the name of the alias; the rest of the line is what gets executed when the alias is used.

    Several of the aliases are more complicated. The aliases in Figure 7.9 are for the tcsh shell, and several of them make use of specific advanced features of that shell (see man tcsh for all of the available features). For example, the alias in Figure 7.9 called line expects two arguments (indicated by !:1 and !:2), while the alias called ll takes all of its arguments (indicated by !*) and inserts them into the middle of a command line.

    Figure 7.9 Using the alias command to see all currently set aliases. Shown are the default aliases for the tcsh shell.

You can create aliases at the command line or by adding them to a configuration file.

Aliases created at the command line are only in effect for as long as you use that shell—that is, they disappear when you close that Terminal window. If you want an alias to always be available, you must put it in a con-figuration file.

To create an alias in tcsh or csh:

  1. alias lf 'ls -F'

    This will create an alias called lf, which the shell will translate into ls -F whenever you use lf as a command. Make sure to enclose the last argument in quotes, either single or double, so that everything after the alias name is treated as a single entity.

    Check to see that the alias is set:

    The line

    should be included in your aliases now.

    Tips

    • If you want to have an alias use arguments from the command line inside the alias definition, you can use !:1 for the first argument, !:2 for the second, and so on. But you must escape the ! in the alias definition. So to define an alias called myword that takes its first argument and searches for it inside the file ~/mydictionary, you would use

    • You could use that alias in this way:

      as a shortcut for

To create an alias in tcsh (or csh) that is set every time you start a shell:

Make

  1. Open your ~/.tcshrc file (for the csh shell use ~/.cshrc).

  2. Add a line with the alias

  3. Save the file.

  4. Quit the editor.

    The new alias will be set for the next shell you start.

  5. Open a new Terminal window to check that the alias is set:

    You should see your new alias in the resulting list.

    TIP

    A set of example aliases for the tcsh shell are contained in the file /usr/share/tcsh/examples/aliases.

To create an alias in bash:

  1. alias lf='ls -F'

    Note that there are no spaces before or after the equal sign.

  2. alias

    The shell shows all your current aliases, including the one you just created. As with the tcsh shell, bash aliases created at the command line will disappear when you exit the shell.

To create an alias in bash that is set every time you start a shell:

Alias For Mac Os X 10.13

  1. Open your ~/.bash_profile file.

  2. Add a line with the alias—for example, alias lf='ls -F'

  3. Save the file.

  4. Quit the editor.

    The new alias will be set for the next shell you start.

  5. Open a new Terminal window to check that the alias is set:

    You should see your new alias in the list:

Shell functions

Unlike aliases in the tcsh shell, aliases in bash cannot have command-line arguments included in them. However, bash allows you to create shell functions, which can make use of their arguments.

The term shell function applies to series of shell command lines. This is similar to an alias, except that a shell function can be many lines long, and you may use the special variables $1 for the first argument, $2 for the second, and so on.

Shell functions should be defined in your ~/.bash_profile.

To create a shell function in bash:

  1. Open your ~/.bash_profile.

    The entire function you will be entering is shown in Figure 7.10. Fifa manager 14 for mac. This sample function looks up a word in two different files that make up a dictionary.

    Figure 7.10 Code listing of a bash shell function.

  2. Enter the first line of the new function. In this example you are creating a function called 'word':

    The parentheses tell bash that this is a function definition. The bracket ({) marks the beginning of the commands in the function.

  3. Enter the body of the function:

    Notice that the function can have more than one line of commands.

    The $1 is a variable that will be replaced with the first argument when you use the function in a command line. (Read the file /usr/share/dict/README for a description of the web2 and web2a files.)

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  4. Finish the function definition with a }. Double-check that what you entered looks like Figure 7.10.

  5. Save the file.

  6. Quit the editor.

    The new function will be in effect with the next Terminal window you open.

  7. Open a new Terminal window.

  8. Test the function by trying it on the command line. If you are using the example function from Figure 7.10, then the first argument you supply is used in the function. The function searches two different files for its first argument.

  9. word auspic

    You should get the output shown in Figure 7.11. Your new shell function, word, takes its first argument (the $1 in the function) and searches for it in the two files. The function is really a short shell script (see Chapter 9, 'Creating and Using Scripts') but is part of your personal shell configuration.

    Figure 7.11 Using the new shell function to look up 'auspic' in the dictionary.


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