In computer sciences, an alias is a name which usually designates an already-named reference.
Aliases are names used to designate objects, items and settings which already possess a name. In *nix systems, they usually serve as :
Hostnames ; a machine possesses a unique hostname, which can be surrounded by aliases. On a Linux system, you can find your hostname by typing
hostname
, whereas the/etc/hosts
file might contain other aliases for the IP representation of your machine on its network interfaces.Users ; on *nix systems, each user has a given name, registered in the
/etc/passwd
file. However, for some other purposes such as email processing, it might be useful to create aliases for users. This can be done in the/etc/aliases
file. (e.g.root
is usually aliased as thepostmaster
).Shell commands ; on *nix systems, it is possible to set an alias referencing a command/program (with possible options and arguments). The most common one is probably
ll
, which designatesls -l
(long list). An alias can be created using thealias
(man page) command, and destroyed thanks to theunalias
bash utility (man page).
One could also consider UNIX links as an implementation of aliases for files (in the UNIX meaning). See ln
for more information (man page).
Each application handles its aliases as it wishes to. Some don't even implement this possibility, and expect the administrator to use the real resources names. Please refer to the applications' documentation for more information on specific cases.