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The Elusive Command Alias Function?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the enhanced-terminal-software dept.

Meph_the_Balrog asks: "I work as a helpdesk jockey for a company that manages over 1200 linux based servers, across a huge area. Currently we use a Windows SSH client to provide remote server support, and I don't have the weight to convince management to deploy alias scripts to all of the servers we support. I admit this question may seem frivolous to some, perhaps dangerous to others, so I have a twofold question. Do any of you out there use a Windows based SSH client that supports command aliasing? If you have strong objections to this sort of technology, what inherent problems do you see with it?"

1 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. What kind of aliases? by stevey · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm guessing from the mention of Windows that you're thinking of things like:

    alias del='rm'
    alias dir='ls'

    Hard to say with such a vague question though, especially with the idea that the client must support the aliases. The clients I've used terraterm and PuTTY are the most commonly used, and putty at least doesn't support aliases. (Can't recall terraterm using them either, but I admit I didn't use it often).

    Personally I think that having DOS-style aliases is a mistake. Even though they might seem helpful to users of DOS/Windows it can cause problems when people realise the commands, even aliased, don't work in the way that they'd expect.

    Unless you could offer a 100% compatible environment it would be best to let people realise that Unix is different and work with it as it should be.