Command line shortcut for lengthy SSH commands
We love tips that make your computing life easier, and this command line tip from Cedrik Morgan falls into that category:
“If you have a server that you commonly access a nice way to avoid typing a lengthy command like ‘ssh 192.168.1.100 -l admin’ over and over again is to create an alias in your .profile, here’s how to set it up:
From the command line use a text editor, I’ll suggest nano because it’s easy to use, type:
nano .profile
and add the following line to your .profile:
alias servername="ssh serverIP.com -l username -p port"
now instead of typing out the ful ‘ssh serverIP blah blah’ command, you can just type servername, much easier! “
Thanks Cedrik! We’ve covered the alias command a bit in the past with the article titled Launching GUI Applications from the Terminal, check it out for more info.
not a bad tip, but I think Cedrik must have been living under a rock for 10 years because the alias command has been used in unix for eternity
Use ~/.ssh/config for this sort of thing. Look at
man ssh_config
Here’s a way to do make an alias permanent without having to resort to a text editor in bash:
add_alias ()
{
local aname=$1;
shift;
echo “alias $aname=\”$@\”" | tee >> “$HOME/.bashrc”;
eval “alias $aname=\”$@\”"
}
Once this handy function is in your .bashrc, you can just type:
$ add_alias servername ssh -p 800 username@servername
That will create the alias “servername” and add it to the end of your .bashrc so the next time you start up a terminal session, the alias will be available again.
I love aliasing, but for this, ~/.ssh/config is an infinitely superior solution.