Understanding Aliases

If you ever watch any crime dramas on television, you might see some criminal who uses more than one name. Of course, only one of those names is the criminal’s real name. All of the other names are fake names, or aliases, that the criminal uses to prevent being found by the police. In the world of operating system shells, aliases are quite useful and have nothing to do with criminal activity. In fact, you’re already using them without realizing it.

Think of an alias as a command that you can use in place of another command. For example, let’s say that you’re one of those poor souls who’s stuck using Windows most of the time, and who only occasionally gets the chance to work with Linux.

Now, let’s say that every time you get on a Linux machine, you instinctively always type in Windows commands, as you’re doing here:

[donnie@fedora-server ~]$ ls
[donnie@fedora-server ~]$ ls -a
.  ..  .bash_history  ...