10 handy Bash aliases for Linux

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Here is one that should reset your terminal after accidentally reading a binary file, in most cases. Some of these are different on linux vs. unix vs. mac. You could put these in a file in /etc/profile.d/ or in your ~/.bashrc

    alias fix='reset; stty sane; tput rs1; clear; echo -e "\033c"'

List only directories:

    alias lsd='ls -h -b --color=auto -d */'

List by size:

    alias lss='ls -Ao --sort=s'

Hand dyslexia, or the alternate to installing "sl"

    alias sl=ls
    alias xit=exit
    alias moer="more"
    alias mroe="more"

Long PS

    alias p="ps -Hefcwww"

Shorthand for disk and memory usage:

    alias f="df -Ph;free -m"

Bash function to display colors:

    function colors()
    {
    for fgbg in 38 48 ; do
    for color in {0..256} ; do
    echo -en "\e[${fgbg};5;${color}m ${color}\t\e[0m"
    if [ $((($color + 1) % 10)) == 0 ] ; then
    echo
    fi
    done
    echo
    done
    }

Functions to do rot13 and rot47 to get around word filters

    function rot13() { if [ -r $1 ]; then cat $1 | tr '[N-ZA-Mn-za-m5-90-4]' '[A-Za-z0-9]'; else echo $* | tr '[N-ZA-Mn-za-m5-90-4]' '[A-Za-z0-9]'; fi }
    function rot47() { if [ -r $1 ]; then cat $1 | tr '\!-~' 'P-~\!-O' ; else echo $* | tr '\!-~' 'P-~\!-O'; fi }

A couple of memory stat functions

    function memfree() {
    free|awk '/^Mem/ {printf "%4.1f",($2-$4-$6-$7)/$2*100}'
    }

    function memperuser() {
    ps aux | awk 'NR != 1 {x[$1] += $4} END{ for(z in x) {print z, x[z]"%"}}'
    }

These are pretty neat, but weirdly uninformed on some things .

If you're using GNU tar the alias should just be "tar -xvf" since it can autodetect compression (though I'm not sure if that's suffix-based or file type). This also means you can append your own -j or whatever for different compression types if you need to do so manually.

Specifying "wget -c" does not mean you'll be able to resume if something goes wrong, it forces resumption from a partial file you already have on a subsequent invocation. The reason to specify it on the first invocation is just so that you can be lazy and reuse that command line.

The shasum command is from Perl on most (all?) platforms, sha256sum from GNU coreutils or equivalent may be needed if it's missing and may have higher performance.

Probably most importantly, ipconfig is OS and distro-specific. It was missing on the first linux systems I checked (Ubuntu and openSUSE). It's useful, but it's a bit like listing a launchctl alias without specifying it's largely macOS-specific.

This article covers gems like `alias c='clear'` - very handy! scnr