Comments on: Mac OS X Terminal Aliases

By: Anthony

Anthony — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 10:06:31 +0000

Great article Chris, thanks very much!

I’ve been trying for the past two days to get aliases to work in my Terminal having recently started to try to use the Terminal a lot more (I’m a noob).

John Vilsack, thank you so much for the ‘source ~/.bash_profile’ tip. I had just about exhausted everything I could find about why my aliases were not working and this did the trick!

By: Yuval

Yuval — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 04:19:30 +0000

Thanks.
Great shortcuts.
and thanks John for the source trick.

By: John Vilsack

John Vilsack — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 20:45:40 +0000

Instead of restarting terminal, you can type:

source ~/.bash_profile

This reloads your bash profile and adds your new aliases to your session!

By: andrius

andrius — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 12:13:45 +0000

try editing ~/.profile

By: Linus

Linus — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 22:22:56 +0000

This may be a bit late……

@Timo, you have to restart your terminal after editing ~/.bash_profile

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 22:23:33 +0000

Timo: Thanks for your comment! Here are some things to note:

1) Make sure the ‘ are actually single quotes. I’ve noticed some instances were they have morphed into ` or special apostrophes.
2) You may also want to make sure there are no spaces between the equal (=) sign. I think that can cause issues as well (but not positive)

If you’re still having problems, feel free to contact me directly. I actually just made these aliases on Snow Leopard just this past week and they worked okay for me.

Good luck!

By: Timo

Timo — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:55:42 +0000

Hey Chris,
i just moved from linux to my first Mac System and tried some usual linux scripting stuff.
First of all, I need some aliases like ll -> ls -la ……

If found so many “documentations” about it and guess what: None does work for my os x 10.6 :-(
unfortunatly.

i just tried your one.
vi ~/.bash_profile
none of your alias suggestions work. What is the difference? What system do you use?
Propably a syntax failure. the alias-man-page didnt help that much.

Would like to hear from you,
take care
timo

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:57:24 +0000

Haha! Well, this is more geared toward advanced “hacking” of OS X.

In short, no, this particular tip won’t allow you to move your iTunes library around. Still working on that particular solution :)

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:18:25 +0000

yes – what in the bejesus are you even talking about? and could this facilitate moving the itunes library around?