Introduction

The command line is awesome. Aliases are awesome. Talking to your computer using natural language is also pretty awesome. With bam, you can have it all :]

What’s in a name

BAM is an anagram. An anagram of an acronym. An acranagram, if you will (anacronym has a nice ring to it as well, but is already taken). It stands for “Multi-word Aliases for Bash”.

Installation

… is easy!

A home for bam

Choose a directory for bam to live in (note that for best performance this should be a directory you have write access to) …

$ cd /path/to/bams/new/home

… and bring them home:

$ git clone git://github.com/itsjeyd/bam.git

Bam wakes up

After a long trip through the interwebs, bam might be napping. You want to make sure that bam is awake and ready to start playing. Get closer and give bam a gentle pat on the head:

$ cd bam
$ chmod +x bam.py

A name for bam

Throughout your day you probably need to be in a lot of different places. While you’re working, you can’t stay right by bam’s side the whole time. You want bam to respond to your calls even if you’re far away. That is what names are for:

$ sudo ln -s ~+/bam.py /usr/bin/BAMS-NEW-NAME

You can name bam anything you like. For example, BAMS-NEW-NAME could be zed, mia, or even marcellus.

Bam gets ready

Almost there. The last thing left to do is for bam to unpack and set up the toy box:

$ bam setup

Make sure you call bam by the name you chose in the previous step when doing this.

There you go. Now it’s time to start teaching bam some commands.

Usage

Adding new aliases

You can teach bam new commands by using the (SURPRISE!) new command:

$ bam new

bam will first prompt you for a command…

Enter command: ls -la

… and then for an alias to associate with the command:

Enter alias: list all the files

You can then run your new command using its alias like this:

$ bam list all the files

Wildcards

A lot of commands work on specific files or directories. It would be tedious to have to add different aliases for the same command just because its arguments are different. Consider for example a command like

$ du -sh

which can be used to determine the size of specific files or folders. Instead of adding multiple different aliases for running this command on different targets, bam allows you to define a single alias using one or more wildcards. Wildcards are integers surrounded by square brackets:

$ bam new
Enter command: du -sh [0]
...
Enter alias: how big is [0]
BAM! "du -sh [0]" can now be run via "how big is [0]".

You can now use this alias to ask bam about the size of any file or folder you like by simply inserting its name (or path) into the alias at the position of the wildcard:

$ bam how big is /home/vincent/Documents
Running "du -sh /home/vincent/Documents" ...

2.2M	.

You can use as many wildcards as you like as long as their values (i.e., the integers between the square brackets) are unique and match up correctly between the alias and the underlying command.

You can’t do this, for example:

$ bam new
Enter command: ls -l [0] | grep [0]
...
Enter alias: list all [0] files in [0]

The following would would work …

$ bam new
Enter command: ls -l [0] | grep [1]
...
Enter alias: list all [0] files in [1]

… but it wouldn’t yield the desired results:

$ bam list all py files in /home/jules/python-project
Running "ls -l py | grep /home/jules/python-project" ...

ls: cannot access py: No such file or directory

See the “Examples” section below for a working version of this alias, as well as some more examples for aliases using wildcards.

Listing aliases

You can use the list command to make bam show you a list of all your commands and aliases:

$ bam list

See the “Examples” section below for an example of what the output of the list command will look like.

Deleting aliases

The delete command is used to selectively remove aliases from bam’s database:

$ bam delete

You will be prompted for the alias you want to delete. If you enter an alias that doesn’t exist in the database, bam will tell you. If the alias does exist, bam will ask for confirmation before proceeding.

Removing the database

If for whatever reason you want to get rid of all of your aliases at once, you’ll have to use the destroy command:

$ bam destroy

Getting help

To get a listing of all basic commands bam responds to you can use the help command:

$ bam help

Examples

ID  COMMAND                          ALIAS
0   git push origin master           push it real good
1   cp -R * [0]                      copy all files to [0]
2   ls [0] | grep [1]                show me all [1] files in [0]
3   rm *~                            get rid of temp files
4   du -sh /var/cache/apt/archives/  how big is apt cache
5   chmod +x [0]                     make [0] executable
6   bam list                         show me my aliases
7   grep -lr [0] ./*                 list files containing [0]

Credits

BAM was, among other things, inspired by Zach Holman’s very cool boom app.