I want to make a bash alias of the following command, which works typed out on the command line but all my attempts at making an alias have failed. My only diagnosis is that all those nested quotes and the loop are scary and I don't know how to handle them.
sudo ss -x src "*/tmp/.X11-unix/*" | grep -Eo "[0-9]+\s*$" | while read port
do sudo ss -p -x | grep -w $port | grep -v X11-unix
done | grep -Eo '".+"' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
Is it possible to alias this command?
For anything more complicated than, say, adding an option to some command, use shell functions rather than aliases.
Here's a function, mything, that you would define in the same place where you would ordinarily define aliases, which runs the command s that you show:
mything () {
sudo ss -x src "*/tmp/.X11-unix/*" |
grep -Eo "[0-9]+\s*$" |
while read -r port; do
sudo ss -p -x | grep -w "$port"
done |
grep -v X11-unix | grep -Eo '".+"' |
sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
}
I haven't looked closer to the actual commands that you are running (apart from fixing the unquoted use of $port and moving one grep out of the loop), but it seems like at least some of the operations may be replaceable by awk and you should be able to remove that loop or at least move sudo ss out of it. The main thing is that if you have something even remotely complicated to run, create a shell function for it.
