Adding Aliases For the Command Line

For a while, I've been wanting to be able to make Aliases for the terminal. An alias is a type of shortcut for the command line. For example, rather than typing...

killall Dock

...I might want to shorten it down to...

ka Dock

This makes it a lot quicker, and easier, to force quit applications from Terminal. Well, MacTips.org recently had an tip on this. And here's how you make an alias for the command line.

Step 1: Open Terminal.app (Applications>Utilities>Terminal.app


Step 2: Now that Terminal's open, we need to edit the .bashrc file in your home folder. To edit it in Pico, use:

pico ~/.bashrc


Step 3: Once the pico editor has opened, we need to add a shortcut. The format for a shortcut is:

alias shortcut="the_original_command"

So, to add a shortcut for killall, we would use:

alias ka="killall"


Step 4: We now need to close pico. To do this, hit the Ctrl-X (^X) keyboard shortcut. Then, type a "y". Finally, hit "Return" to save it as "~/.bashrc". As a note, you can see what you're doing with ^X, Y, Return, by looking at the bottom of the Terminal window.


Step 5: You need to "refresh" the .bashrc file in Terminal. To do this, type:

source ~/.bashrc


Step 6: Type in your new shortcut and test it out! Now, when I type...

ka Dock

...it will force the Dock to restart.


That's it! If you were wondering, I learned this from MacTips.org. Also, if you are having issues with it not working, make sure that you type in the quotes (") rather than copy/pasting them.


BTW, I will be traveling the next week (until the 31st) so I will not be posting tips at a consistent time like I try to. However, there should still be a new tip every day. (Except Saturday)