The Elusive Command Alias Function?

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?"

Comments

What kind of aliases?

[stevey]

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.

bleh

[Intangion]

some of the ask slashdot questions are really getting stupid...

do you guys think i should wear a blue shirt tomarrow? ive heard alot of people like blue shirts but i was curious if anyone knew of any problems wearing blue shirts?

I get what he wants.

[Valdrax]

Okay, I get it now. Here's what the guy wants:

He has no power to install his favored command aliases on all of the machine he has to administrate. He wants to have an SSH client (that he can run on Windows to connect to the Linux machines) that will interpret what he types and substitute aliases so that he doesn't have to set up his favored commands every time he logs into a system.

I don't know if you can set an SSH session into a line-based instead of keystroke-based communication mode. By default, it sends messages to the remote server after every keystroke and not after enter is hit at the end of a line -- otherwise using curses-based applications would really, really hurt as would using tab-completion, vi mode, and other advanced shell features. If this can't be done, then a client couldn't interpret your commands before you send them.

I don't forsee anyone providing this functionality because the demand is so low. This is the kind of thing that the remote end is expected to handle for you.