How to store a Unix alias?

Question

I know I can create an alias for untar like this

alias untar=’tar -xvzf’

How do I make this persist from session to session, because it seems it is lost when I reconnect?

Answer 1

As already stated, ~/.bashrc is where you want to place them. You may like this little function I use to create aliases (place it in your ~/.bashrc file).

function mkalias ()
{
        if [[ $1 && $2 ]]
        then
        echo -e "alias $1=\"$2\"" >> ~/.bashrc
        alias $1="$2"
        fi
}

The basic syntax is: mkalias <name> "<command>"

an example would be: mkalias trsh "mv --target-directory=$HOME/.Trash"

the command is always placed in quotes in case there are spaces.

Answer 2

You usually write the alias in $HOME/.bashrc (if you are using the bash shell).

Otherwise take a look at this wikipedia article to know which configuration file your shell will read.

In order to know which shell you are using look at the SHELL environment variable with:

$ echo $SHELL 

Answer 3

You can add it to your .profile or .bashrc. There are usually some other aliases there, so follow those examples and you should be just fine.