For a while now ive been using aliases to connect to machines. I alias a $hostname to xterm -T $hostname -e ssh $hostname &. This means each connection gets a new fresh xterm. Of course doing an alias command for each host woudl be tedious so i have some magic in bash startup stuff.

bob@betty:~ >cat .bashrc 
[ -f ~/.bash_aliases ] && . ~/.bash_aliases
PS1="\u@\h:\w >"
PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:/sbin
bob@betty:~ >cat .bash_aliases 
for MACHINE in `cat ~/.machines`
do
alias $MACHINE="xterm -T $MACHINE -e ssh $MACHINE &"
done

Where .machines is a list of machines one per line

Recently I have been connecting to machines which arnt in this list with ssh directly. This has the disadvantage that they dont get their own xterm and I have to start another xterm manually if I need another one. So I started to looking into aliasing ssh to the same thing. However, aliases arnt clever enough for this you need to use functions instead.

So I wrote a function to do what i wanted.

function ssh {
xterm -T $1 -e ssh $1 &
}

It then occured to me since this is just programming perhaps I can expand this to check to see if host is mentioned in .machines and if it isnt add it. So I wrote a function

function testmachine {
machine=`grep $1 ~/.machines`
if [ "x$machine" = "x" ]
then
        echo "not in ~/.machines adding"
        echo $1 >> ~/.machines
        source ~/.bash_aliases
fi
}

As you can see it also then sources ~/.bash_aliases this makes sure that the current shell gets the new alias. I then added more to the ssh fucntion

function ssh {
xterm -T $1 -e ssh $1 &
testmachine $1
}

I then told my .bashrc to source a new file called .bash_functions which contains the two fucntions from above. And everything is now good.

In the pub the other day for the London.pm Social Smylers brought up the stuff he uses to make hostnames a bash command. He also found the time to generate some hate.

I do this another way as I have previoulsy blogged. Dominic Mitchell at the time pointed out that my scripting sucks. In fact my current version takes his suggestions on board.