How can I speed up CLI typing in Cisco IOS using shortcuts?

Question

I know we can use auto-completion (tab key) and abbreviated commands (such as sh ip int bri) to speed up typing.

However, I'm still not satisfied with typing crypting chains such as sh ip dh sn bi | i 20.12 for show ip dhcp snooping binding | include 20.12.

Can I define shortcuts for often used command sequences, and how?

Answer 1

We can use the alias command in global conf mode:

alias <mode> <command-alias> <original-command>

<mode> is one of the many IOS command modes. If you need it in different modes, you have to call it for each one - type alias ? to get a long list of modes.

An example for checking for a dhcp snooped IP, type in global conf mode

alias exec snoop show ip dhcp snooping binding | include

Now you can simply type snoop 172.16.20.12 to check for this IP or snoop 801 for checking all IPs in VLAN 801, for example. Do similarly for show mac-address-table | include and you're faster in searching and troubleshooting.

Further tipps:

• document your aliases for you and for your collegues
• sh aliases shows your aliases plus the predefined ones
• while no alias <mode> <command> can be guessed for removing an alias, no alias <mode> deletes the aliases for a complete mode - so you can clear several at once, default alias <mode> works similarly, as expected
• if you decide to use aliases, deploy them once everywhere you may need them
• tools like Cisco Prime can help in deploying
• don't forget the original commands ;-)

Answer 2

For complicated tasks, I suggest looking at TCL. You can use TCL to create scripts that can be stored and run on your IOS/Nexus devices providing an amazing amount of flexibility in collecting and displaying data.

While it isn't necessarily faster for simple tasks, you can collect and correlate information from multiple commands and reformat it as you like. It can also pull information from SNMP.

If you haven't looked into it, you can find one such document here.

Edit: I didn't add this, but probably should have. Once you have your TCL script in place, you can use the alias command from Stefan's great answer to create a faster access to the script. For example:

alias exec mac-lookup tclsh flash:mac-lookup.tcl

Answer 3

Personally I think alias' are a bad idea. You never know when you're going to be logging onto a device that doesn't have your favourite alias defined. Then you need to remember what you type form the start again.

The best thing to do? Just keep typing it out. Eventually your typing speed will improve.

Answer 4

If you use securecrt (and if you dont want to get into too much shell scripting) for your telnet/ssh/console access you can always "record" your commands, it has an option and then you can simply select your recorded script in tools I believe it is

Answer 5

Depending on what you do a better option may be to write shell, expect, or other scripts to do your common tasks.

For basic troubleshooting it's even nicer to have my alerting system already perform the info-gathering part.

Combining tools like notch, with related tools like its "Mr CLI" can let you create some really powerful tools very easily, giving you a hand today, and an easy route to further improve things tomorrow, if not by fully automating you might be able to shift the tasks onto a helpdesk who can be given a trivial web-app which does the basic steps and helps fix user problems faster.