The alias
command allows you to define a short mnemonic for a long command. For instance, we can define the following alias to start the IPython server when we type ipnb
:
$ alias ipnb='ipython notebook'
We can define aliases for the current session only, but usually we define aliases in the .bashrc
startup file (the dot in the file name means that it is a hidden file) found in the home directory. If you find yourself having many aliases, it may be useful to create a file containing all the aliases. You can then source this file from .bashrc
.