Extending your bash shell with aliases, functions and extra commands

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Extending your bash shell with aliases, functions and extra commands

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2015-11-28 08:54:31 - Graham Ellis
Want a command to do some composite job, but it doesn't exist? You can add new commands into your bash script using

functions ... see example [here] from last week's course.

aliases ... here are the aliases that I'm using to provide my own extra / modified commands on our web server:

  -bash-4.1$ alias

  alias l.='ls -d .* --color=auto'

  alias ll='ls -l --color=auto'

  alias ls='ls --color=auto'

  alias pd='pushd'

  alias vi='vim'

  alias which='alias | /usr/bin/which --tty-only --read-alias --show-dot --show-tilde'

  -bash-4.1$

another script ...

adding executables ...

Shell programming is so much about bolting together other programs and utilities - and they can include other shell programs as well as code in other languages. Paramaters can be passed in from the command line, data from STDIN, and from the environment - remember to use export if you want a shell variable / environmet variable to be shared with something you're running from your script.