Making bash shortcuts, like ~ for Home
 

~ in bash is a shortcut for /home. How can I make others?

For example, I have a text file called phone.txt. Instead of things like "/mnt/hda2/txt/phone.txt", can I just type "ph"? (I know it's an odd question, but I want to have it so I can just enter "grep ph Melissa" and have it print "Melissa - 1234 5678".)

The tilde shorthand notation is built-in to bash, so you can't really create equivalents to that, but you can use aliases, like this:

alias ph="/mnt/hda2/txt/phone.txt"

This only works for executable files, as far as I know. For normal files, though, you might just create a symbolic link to the file you want to use, like this:

ln -s /mnt/hda2/txt/phone.txt ~/ph

That'll create a file called 'ph' in your home directory that links directly to /mnt/hda2/txt/phone.txt. Then you can do things like 'grep Melissa ~/ph'.

You can make simple shellscripts to do the task for you. I am not skilled in making shellscripts, but I have a few shellscripts that I use as "shortcuts".

or you can make a shortcut by adding /etc/bashrc

vi /etc/bashrs -- > then add

alias not useful if your system not up all the time cause when you reboot you have to add all your shortcuts again

thanks

you can create an environment variable for this.

from the shell you can type the following
export ph=/mnt/hda2/txt/phone.txt

now your grep command will look something like this:

grep $ph Melissa

you could also create an alias for the above grep command

alias phone='grep -i $ph'

then, if you wanted to lookup melissa's phone number you could do the following

phone melissa

-rhett

nice answer :)