Shell Programming and Scripting

How do I create shortcuts? For example:

I just want to type one key "l" and have it output the command of "ls -lah"

I believe it's creating a file called l with 755 permissions but I'm not sure where to put the file.

*if it matters, I'm on a shared hosting web server using cPanel with SSH access of course.

Thanks,
Chris

-bash-3.2$ l

UNIX doesn't have "shortcuts" as you know them. And symbolic links, which some people consider similar, don't ever contain commandline parameters. You might be thinking of a shell script?

It's better to use an alias for private, simple commands like that, though. Much simpler, less mess, needs no special permissions, and has no need to create any files in sensitive or protected places. Try typing

Code:

$ alias "l=ls -lah"
$ l
...
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4.0K Aug 29 23:35 sound
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4.0K Nov 19 20:00 ssh
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root 4.0K Aug 19 06:16 ssl
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4.0K Aug 29 19:21 ssmtp
-r--r-----  1 root root  750 Dec 19 09:42 sudoers
-rw-------  1 root root  750 Dec 19 09:43 sudoers.tmp
-rw-r-----  1 root root 1.5K Nov 19 20:00 sysctl.conf
...
$

If that works like it does for me, you can add it to your .bash_profile:

Code:

$ echo 'alias "l=ls -lah"' >> ~/.bash_profile

...which will make it run that line automatically on login.

Thank you that worked perfect.