UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I would be happy to streamline some of the commands I am trying to learn with easy to remember terms, like dir for ls -l. I am wondering if you script certain commands for every time you start-up your system, can use those aliases there? If so, would that prove a problem for administrators who come in to work on your account (i.e. a bunch of three letter terms that mean nothing to anyone but you)?

IMO it is not a good taste to make such kind of aliases (dir -> ls -l etc.)

If you change to another Unix system without these aliases and you are used to rely on these aliases you will then have difficulties.

The point of creating aliases is to reduce amount of typing for frequently-used commands, not to make different OSes look similar because different OSes have different characteristics and making an alias is not sufficient to mask the differences in terms of commands.

It's easy to visualize. DOS commands use a / for arguments while - for Unix, and the arguments for "dir" are also different from that of "ls" on Unix.

SuSE linux comes with these kind of aliases and they turned up to have created more confusion than good. It's tempting to use them, but you will never properly learn Unix if you are to blindly adhere to them.

also because commands in dos have a different way of of taking options, and because the 'dir' command in dos behaives very differently than 'ls' in unix. if you have 'ls' aliased as 'dir', what happens when you type :
dir /p

well nothing would happen as that is not the way what you are trying to accomplish is done.