Friday, July 15, 2011

alias oneliner: make yum installs a little faster

I should preface this with: I KNOW that alias is a oneliner command by its very nature. :-)  But sometimes it's just fun to pass on even the little commands. dw


Ever get tired of entering:

yum install WhatIWant

then having to enter y or no to confirm. Or worse, being reminded by the system that you need to be root and then having to:

sudo yum install WhatIWant

An easy thing to do in the bash shell is to use an alias. If you want permanent aliases, you can easily create these as well by creating the ~/.bash_aliases file, which will then run at start up. The file should have one row per alias command, exactly the same way you  would enter the below on the command line:

alias myyumi='sudo yum -y install'

After running this command, I am now able to enter the below to install something and have the YES option assumed. The two side notes here are:
1) You must be in the sudoers file to execute this alias
2) If you do not have NOPASSWD set in the sudoers file then you WILL have to enter your password prior to the yum process starting.

I have met the two conditions above and run the alias command. Now I can run:

myyumy WhatIWant

and WhatIWant should install without any further interaction on my part (not accounting for any possible dependency hells that is).

A note on the nameing of my alias:
- I like to use 'my' at the start of aliases as a matter of personal preference....because I made it. :-)
- The 'yum' in the middle should be easy to grasp: it's a representation of the root command, in this case yum. If it was a command like system-config-network then I would use 'snc'
- The 'y' at the end is the parameter(s) I am including in the aliases. Metacharacters can be used in aliases too. So if I wanted to run the system-config-network aliased and in the background I would create the alias like:

alias mysnc&='system-config-network &'

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