Question

What are your favorite bash aliases?

Bash aliases are awesome. They can save you keystrokes and give you shortcuts to some of your most used commands. I’ll share some of my own down in the answers.

What’s in your .bashrc file? What bash aliases have you found the most useful?

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Justin Ellingwood • September 2, 2016

The one that I always make sure to include is:

alias sudo='sudo '

This looks a bit confusing, but essentially, it makes all of the other aliases you define function correctly when used with sudo. The ALIASES section of the bash manual says:

If the last character of the alias value is a blank, then the next command word following the alias is also checked for alias expansion.

So this is just a nice way of making sure your commands are evaluated for aliases before being passed over to sudo, which ends up being pretty useful.

Michael Lenardson • September 2, 2016
alias ls='ls -AlhF --color=auto'

NEVER terminal without it ;-)

Patrick Mullins • September 5, 2016

Here are a few more of my favorite aliases.

Show/hide hidden files in the macOS Finder:

alias show="defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true && killall Finder"
alias hide="defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool false && killall Finder"

Limit ping to five ECHO_REQUEST packets:

alias ping='ping -c 5'

Display drives and space in human readable format:

alias drives='df -h'

Run this one in ~/ to discover what folders are using the most space:

alias usage='du -h -d1'

Colorize grep output

alias grep='grep --color=auto -n'

Clear the screen (can’t live without this one!)

alias c='clear'

That’s all, folks!

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