Alias adds to OSX Terminal

Since my latest job has gotten me using the Terminal in OSX much moreso than I used to, I’ve had to bone up on my unix (and linux) commands. Unfortunately, when OSX sets up your user account, there is no .bashrc file (that I could find) for doing things like setting up handy command aliases. For example, by default, typing “ls ~” in the terminal will give you a listing of your home directory, but will not list any “invisible” files (those that start with “.”). So, it would be nice to have “ls” actually call “ls -a” every time.

So, to accomplish this, you need to create 2 files, “.bashrc” and “.bash_profile” in your user directory. The contents of the .bash_profile file need to be as such for starters:

. ~/.bashrc
ENV=$HOME/.bashrc
export ENV

Then, the contents of .bashrc need to be something like this:

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/usr/local/bin
alias ls="ls -a"
SHELL=/bin/bash

This will get you started. If you have any questions beyond that, do some online searches for .bashrc and shell configuration. (I’m no expert, I just figure out what I need to do to get stuff done…)