Do you find yourself SSHing into different accounts on the same machine all the time? Add this to your .bashrc:

function hal() {
    ssh $1@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
}
export -f hal

The first line creates a function named after the machine (obviously, our server is named after HAL-9000). Name it whatever you’d like, although make sure not to step on any existing Unix commands.

On the second line, change xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to whatever the ip (or domain) of the machine you want to access is. I assume no password or ssh keys but you could hardcode login credentials or add them as additional parameters.

The final line basically just turns the function into a command. The end result is that ssh scott@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx can now be accessed with hal scott. No need to remember the IP, no need to type extra characters. I suggest having an extra beer with that thirty seconds a day I just saved you.

Update:

Since writing this, I discovered Fabric, a python library for automating common tasks both locally and on remote hosts. I mention it because it makes it super easy to accomplish a lot of the things that you’d normally just ssh into a server to do.

Fabric is intended to live inside of your project directy and run tasks related to that project, but what I’ve found useful is to create a few ‘global’ fabfiles that live in a .fab directory I created in my home folder. To invoke them I just create an alias that calls fab with the -f flag and a path to the fabfile.

Now, to update the DigitalOcean server that hosts our site, all I have to do is:

$ ocean update

Magic.