Aliases are usually loaded at initialization of your shell so look in.bashprofile or.bashrc in your home directory. Unalias will only work for your current session. Unless you find where it is defined and loaded, it will be loaded again when you start a new Terminal session. If I remember correctly, when I had bought my Mac, the.bashlogin file wasn't there. I had to create it for myself so that I could put prompt info, alias, functions, etc. edit.bashaliases file and restart terminal or print source /.bashaliases.
- Get Visual Studio Code up and running on Mac (macOS). Note: If you still have the old code alias in your.bashprofile (or equivalent) from an early VS Code version, remove it and replace it by executing the Shell Command. Start a new terminal to pick up your.bashprofile changes.
- I've spent years curating a collection of Mac bash aliases and shortcuts to make my life easier. My full.bashprofile is below, feel free to take whatever you find useful and put it to good use. A (very) quick primer on.bashprofile for Mac Users. There is a hidden file in your Mac's user directory named.bashprofile. This file is loaded.
To make aliases of macOS Unix commands in your bash or zsh shell on macOS and earlier versions, it is done via your .bash_profile or .zsh file which lives in your home account directory, if the file does not already exist, just create one.
As of macOS 10.6 Catalina, Apple has made the zsh shell the default shell, previously it was the bash shell.
Launch Terminal from the /Application/Utilities folder
Go to your home directory by just entering cd followed by the ‘return' key to enter the command:
List your home directory contents including invisible files to see if the file already exists, use:
Mac Alias File
Create the .bash_profile or .zsh file using the command line program called ‘nano' if it doesn't exist:
When the .bash_profile or .zsh file is created you are ready to enter your alias commands.
So here I am using the alias ‘l' to alias the command ‘ls -lah'
In nano ‘control+o' to write the file out and ‘control+x' to exit the file.
Refresh the shell environment by entering the command below:
Or..
That's it, now the alias will take effect.
To add other aliases just start a new line, and apply the same formatting.
Sorry, no Windows instructions as I don't use Windows. Use Google if that's the OS you use.
I found a funny post on Reddit that highlights how we, as developers, can lose productivity over the small things, like typos:
I don't have this set up, as I mostly use a GUI for Git (GitHub Desktop). But I use other aliases. Most notably ll instead of ls -al.
How do I set up an alias in the terminal?
Also check my guides how to use the macOS terminal, the Bash shell and the Bash scripting tutorial.
I said macOS in the title, but this works also on Linux of course.
Here's the syntax:
Here's the example I mentioned above:
This works in Bash, Zsh, Fish shell and others too.
If you write this in your shell, from now on ll will be a new available command in the console.
Note: this alias is going to be valid for the entire session, which means until you close the shell, or you restart the computer, whatever comes first.
To persist the aliase, so you can use them any time in the future, you need to add it to the configuration file for your shell.
If you use Bash, that's the .bash_profile in your home folder. It's an invisible file, so you might need to open it with the terminal rather than the Finder:
~ always points to your home folder path
(assuming you have Visual Studio Code installed, which provides the code command).
If ~/.bash_profile does not exist, you can create it, and the shell will pick it up. You can also use the ~/.bashrc file, if present.
For licensing purposes, macOS Catalina comes with a new shell by default, called Zsh. In this case, the configuration file is in the ~/.zshrc file, still in your home folder.
The fish configuration is stored in ~/.config/fish/config.fish, but you'll most likely configure it via the fish_config command.
Alias File Mac Terminal
Download my free Linux Commands Handbook
Alias For Mac Terminal Linux
