Bash aliases are awesome

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I cannot express how much I love bash aliases and my Bash (Bourne Again) shell.

Ok, “love” might be a little strong, I admit. But still; right next to my IDE and time management habits, Bash aliases are my biggest time savers. Each day I spare tons of time thanks to those.

In this article, I won’t explain what Bash is, why it’s so popular or how to write Bash scripts. Today, I want to explain what bash aliases are and why you should be using them to increase your productivity. This is geared towards power users, but can be used by anyone, not only software developers or system administrators.

Note: for those who prefer the Fish shell: kudos to you, you’re the best. A previous colleague of mine almost succeeded in converting me, but I still haven’t taken the time to “migrate” and get used to it. Although, I do see it as a potential replacement for my dear Bash… ;-)

Let’s discover why Bash aliases ROCK.

Condensed vs verbose commands

I usually “hate” it when people share commands like:

tar -czvf compressed_files.tar.gz files/

This one is really popular, but do you really understand why it’s “czvf” and not something else? I certainly don’t.