My question is whether it is good practice to include a unique wrapper phrase for custom commands and aliases.

For example, lets say I use the following command frequently:

apt update && apt upgrade -y && flatpak update

I want to save time by shortening this command. I want to alias it to the following command:

update

And lets say I also make up a command that calls a bash script to scrub all of of my zfs and btrfs pools:

scrub

Lets say I add 100 other aliases. Maybe I am overthinking it, but I feel there should be some easy way to distinguish these from native Unix commands. I feel there should be some abstraction layer.

My question is whether converting these commands into arguments behind a wrapper command is worth it.

For example, lets say my initials are “RK”. The above commands would become:

rk update rk scrub

Then I could even create the following to list all of my subcommands and their uses:

rk --help

I would have no custom commands that exist outside of rk, so I add to total of one executable to my system.

I feel like this is the “cleaner” approach, but what do you think? Is this an antipattern? Is is just extra work?

  • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
    2·
    4 months ago

    What I forgot in my previous comment: I have bunch of *rc aliases to open a specific config file with my neovim. It does not matter how the configuration file is named, with an extension, with rc in name, in what directory, it always follows the pattern singlecharacter+rc. Here some examples:

    alias brc='nvim ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc'
alias nrc='nvim ~/.config/nvim'

    As you see, it can even be a directory and not a file in case of nvim config. It would then show a filemanager on that directory with many config files.

    Edit: Another thing I forgot (man I’m getting old) is that you can add a backslash at the front of a command, to run the actual command and not an alias. A common example is to have alias='grep --color=auto' and alias='ls --color=auto' . If this gets in your way, just run the command as \grep or \ls to run the original command instead.