"aliases" permit you to assign alternate names to commands, and to run simple series of commands. For example, if you want "dir" to mean "ls", or "dog" to mean "cat", an alias can do that.
Everyone's different. . .alias is different from other commands in that it is part of the shell you run. Thus, the "csh", "bash", "zsh" and "ksh" shell, each have their own syntax for alias. (The "sh" shell doesn't support aliases). For information on aliases on those shells, see the man page for the shells themselves, send mail to staff if you need help with them.
If you don't know which shell you use, you almost certainly use csh or tcsh, you can tell with:
world% ps -p $$That command will type process information about the current shell, including its name.
aliases are normally established in your .cshrc or .tcshrc file, and you must source that file if you make changes to it which you want to take effect immediately. That is: world% source .cshrc Command Description ------- ----------- alias list aliases currently in effect alias pine pine-3.91 the command "pine" will now run "pine-3.91" \rm run rm itself, not the alias (World accounts are created with rm aliased to "rm -i". alias ls 'ls -F' aliases with spaces should be enclosed in single quotes alias dir 'ls \!* | more' use \!* to reprent command line arguments in t/csh aliases.
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