The Elusive Command Alias Function? 114
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?"
Re:I get what he wants. (Score:3, Interesting)
However, I have a STRONG aversion to lots of aliases, particularly for someone learning systems administration. When I first started using unix, the sysadmins in the Engineering department had set up a bunch of DOS-like aliases on our servers, so we would feel more at home. We came to depend on these, and a few non-DOS aliases too. I think some were there to make csh look more like sh, or vice versa.
The problem came when I went to use a unix machine in the Computer Science department, which didn't have these aliases (I guess the CS students were considered clever enough to learn Unix, whereas the Engineering students expected everything to be DOS). I was lost for some time, and needed to copy the aliases file over (and just finding that took me ages, as I wasn't familiar with
Since then, and 10 years of sysadminning later, I've got a huge aversion to customising environments. For eg, I always use sh (well, ksh), as it's always available and is always installed in the root filesystem. Likewise, the reason every sysadmin should know vi is because it's always there (apart from the fact that it's better for quick edits of small files than emacs). I tend to avoid vendor-specific tools, as I have needed to move between Solaris, IRIX, Linux and BSD too often to "reprogram" my fingers each time. Obviously, it depends on your situation, and now that I have been using Solaris exclusively for about three years, I've become a little less flexible, but generally, I try to stick to the lowest common denominator, and just be really good at it.