My favorite shell aliases

I tend to use full scripts more than shell aliases, but I do have a few that I use all the time. I try to keep them all Bash/ZSH compatible so I can just source one file for either shell---so I avoid things like ZSH’s -g. Anyway, here they are…

cd aliases

These are super handy and I find myself using muscle memory on servers without them. I tend to just spam ...

alias ..='cd ..'
alias ...='cd ../..'
alias ....='cd ../../..'

ls aliases

I think I grabbed most of these from an old CentOS 4 box years ago.

alias l='ls'
alias ll='ls -lh'
alias la='ls -A'

At some point I wanted color all the time, so I threw these in for macOS and Linux.

if [ "${OSTYPE:0:6}" = "darwin" ]; then
  alias ls='ls -G'
elif [ "${OSTYPE:0:5}" = "linux" ]; then
  alias ls='ls --color'
fi

Git aliases

I wrote [a while ago][1] about my git aliases. My favorites are gcomp, and gv.

alias gcomp='git checkout master; git pull'
alias gcomp-='git checkout master; git pull; git checkout -'

These are great for when I need to rebase.

gv is a recent addition. I use [vim-fugitive][2] and love its :Git command. When called without arguments, it shows a nice overview of your repo like git status would. You can then easily commit files with -.

alias gv='vim +Git'

Others

I picked up a few safe guards to avoid clobbering files on accident.

alias rm='rm -iv'
alias cp='cp -iv'
alias mv='mv -iv'

One of my favorites, path, prints each item on your $PATH, one per line.

alias path='echo -e ${PATH//:/\\n}'

On my Raspberry Pis, I setup cpu-temp to output the CPU temperature. It uses vcgencmd which is specific to the Pi and in a non-standard location.

if [ "${OSTYPE:0:5}" = "linux" ] && [ -f /etc/rpi-issue ]; then
  alias cpu-temp="PATH='/opt/cv/bin:$PATH' vcgencmd measure_temp | egrep -o '[0-9\\.]+'"
fi

On my Macs, I sometimes need to flush the DNS cache quickly. I grabbed this years ago, and I think it can just be shortened to the mDNSResponder entry, but I never really bothered to check (maybe I will after publishing this).

if [ "${OSTYPE:0:6}" = "darwin" ]; then
  alias flush-dns='sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder'
fi

I like grep to show matches in color, so I setup this alias.

alias grep='grep --color'

It’s often useful to know your IP, so I setup what-is-my-ip a while ago. The provider has changed a bit over the years.

alias what-is-my-ip="curl https://ifconfig.me; echo"

[1]: {% post_url 2019/2019-10-30-useful-git-configs-and-aliases %} [2]: https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive