Automate a remote rsync command using bash aliases?

Question

I deal with lots of servers that often have files and folders which are not under version control. This means I can just git remote add if I need to work with the files on my local machine.

With that in mind I often am browsing the server when I notice that I need a copy of a certain folder so I wrote this simple bash command to print the command so I can just copy it and run it on my local machine.

#!/bin/bash
echo "sudo rsync -av -e ssh $(whoami)@$HOSTNAME:$(pwd) ./" 

Which outputs a command like this which I can run on my home computer:

sudo rsync -av -e ssh user@hostname:/opt/lib/folder ./

Now my question is, how do I make this into a bash alias so I can add it to my user account on each of the servers?

Answer 1

You can use a function instead of an alias. Just put it into your ~/.bashrc file like this:

print_rsync ()
{
    echo "sudo rsync -av -e ssh $(whoami)@$HOSTNAME:$(pwd) ./"
}

Functions are much more flexible than aliases because you can execute an arbitrary number of commands and even pass parameters.

Answer 2

From my understanding of shell aliases, they are static and you cannot put dynamic things like variables or commands in them.

Just copy your script somewhere in your PATH like /usr/local/bin, or create a bin folder for your user:

mkdir ~/bin
echo 'export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/bin"' >> ~/.bashrc
. .bashrc # or reopen terminal
cp script.sh ~/bin