IDG Contributor Network: Unix aliases for good and evil

The whole point of Unix aliases is to allow you to type less, make fewer mistakes, and not have quite so much to remember. They are generally act as good shortcuts to getting a lot of work done.

Here are some aliases that can be very handy for helping you get work done -- and a few that might just drive your coworkers nuts.

Listing files and sorting by size

Here are some useful aliases for listing interesting files. In the first, the largest files are listed last (r=reverse order) so they'll still be in view when the command completes. The “h” means that file sizes will be displaying in megabytes or gigabytes.

alias FbySize='ls -Slrh'

Listing files with the largest shown first is simpler because this is the default sort.

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