One of the cool things you can do with SSH, is creating aliases for your connections. This is especially useful in cases where you need to connect to a (hard to remember) IP address, use a different user name or a different port number.

Adding an alias is simple. Just add the following to your ~/.ssh/config file:

host foo
  hostname    123.123.123.123
  user        foobar
  port        9876

Now you can simply run ssh foo instead of ssh foobar@123.123.123.123 -p 9876. Much better, right? And with bash completion this will even be autocompleted .

But this wasn't comfort enough for me. I also wanted a way to easily add a new alias from the command line. That's why I added a another function to my set of .bashrc tools:

# SSH bookmark creator
sbm(){
    if [ $# -lt 2 ]; then
        echo "Usage: sbm <short> [<user>@]<hostname> [-p <port>]" >&2
        return 1
    fi
 
    short=$1
    arg=$2
 
    if $(echo "$arg" | grep '@' >/dev/null); then
        user=$(echo "$arg"|sed -e 's/@.*$//')
    fi
 
    host=$(echo "$arg"|sed -e 's/^.*@//')
 
    if [ "$3" == "-p" ]; then
        port=$4
    fi
 
    if $(grep -i "host $short" "$HOME/.ssh/config" > /dev/null); then
        echo "Alias '$short' already exists" >&2
        return 1
    fi
 
    if [ -z "$host" ]; then
        echo "No hostname found" >&2
        return 1
    fi
 
    echo >> "$HOME/.ssh/config"
    echo "host $short" >> "$HOME/.ssh/config"
    echo "  hostname $host" >> "$HOME/.ssh/config"
    [ ! -z "$user" ] && echo "  user     $user" >> "$HOME/.ssh/config"
    [ ! -z "$port" ] && echo "  port     $port" >> "$HOME/.ssh/config"
 
    echo "added alias '$short' for $host"
}

This allows me to call sbm foo foobar@123.123.123.123 -p 9876 to create the above alias. The script is probably not perfect, so if you'd like to improve it checkout this gist at github.

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