new-alias command in action

If you ever use your terminal, you’ve no doubt found yourself typing the same commands over and over again. To speed that process up, you’ve probably made a few aliases — simple commands that automate common tasks: cd’ing into a deep directory, tailing and grepping logs, running servers, etc.

But have you ever been on the fence about creating a new alias? You might say to yourself: this command isn’t that long, I’d rather just type it in yet another time — rather than open up my bash profile and make an alias for it.

Here’s a command that will eliminate those moments — an alias (technically a function) for creating a new alias. This command takes your last command and sticks it in your ~/.bash_profile with whatever alias you specify.

So for example, you could run:

heroku logs --tail --app test-app | grep router --line-buffered

After running that command, run:

new-alias tail-logs

Voila. You have a new alias at your immediate disposal called tail-logs. Run tail-logs in your terminal and you’ll start tailing that Heroku app.