Bash Aliases: Take Them With You

*nix Aliases

We all know how aliases on the *nix system help to create short commands for the long ones. E.g. kga can stand for kubectl get all or gl for git log --name-status --decorate. Software associates create such aliases and write them in the ~/.bashrc file. So aliases are available whenever they logged in to their machine.

The Challenge

However, associates also need to log in to other *nix machines for various purposes. Say a developer needs to log in to the SV system for live troubleshooting of an issue. Or a DevOps Engineer requires to log in to various cloud VMs. One has become very used to his/her alias s/he has created. It's very difficult to copy/paste the aliases every time s/he logs in to the another machine.

The Solution

Here is one way to address this challenge. Create your aliases, categorize and put them in different files. Say General Aliases, , etc. Then create a file. Download it on the machine you have logged in.

wget //raw.githubusercontent.com/simplyatul/bin/master/setaliases.sh

and then source it

source setaliases.sh

That's it. All your aliases are set.

If you are frequently logging in to a particular machine, then just copy the above source command in the ~/.bashrc file.