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Comment by Entangled | Hacker News Reader

Hey that's cool stuff. For a total ignorant like me, where should I go to learn the basics of automating some tasks like I'd like to type $ ipaddress and get the local ip address instead of $ ipconfig getifaddr en0. Is that bash? How is that called? How do I make "programs" to automate tasks and run them from terminal with a single customized word like dbstart dbstop?

Thanks for the pointers.

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The first way that comes to mind is to use alias, e.g. `alias ipaddress="ipconfig getifaddr en0"`. Then running `ipaddress` would do what you want. To avoid having to run this again every time you log in, you can add the same line to your `~/.bash_profile`, which configures your shell when you log in before the initial command prompt. You can then type `source ~/.bash_profile` to reload your configuration without having to log out then back in.

or just box$ . ~/.bash_profile

But I prefer zsh/prezto. I spend far too much time on the command line, so I want it to look pretty and tab-complete all the things.

Ok, so I write a bash script then create an alias for it like alias hello="bash hello.sh"

Something like that? I found some nice bash tutorials that'll keep me busy for the weekend. Thanks.

Edit: Ok, apparently alias hello is not needed since hello.sh can be run directly with just the name, I was having permission problems and couldn't make it run, but now with just $ hello I can see the output. I'm loving it!

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